Secret Graveyards
The Nickel Boys, ICE, and the moral danger of institutions certain they are serving justice
Two men were killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers over six days…federal agents had not been looking for either of them.
On July 7, an ICE officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during an early-morning traffic stop in Houston. Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican construction contractor, had lived in the United States for more than three decades. His family said he was driving relatives and members of his crew to work when agents in unmarked vehicles pulled up to stop his van. ICE had been surveilling a nearby address and believed someone associated with the van resembled the target of a warrant. ICE’s acting director later confirmed that neither Salgado Araujo nor his brother was the man agents had been sent to arrest.
The Department of Homeland Security said Salgado Araujo ignored commands, struck an ICE vehicle, and attempted to run over an officer, who then fired in self-defense. Men riding in the van dispute that account. Through an attorney, they said the officer began shooting almost immediately and that Salgado Araujo never steered toward him. The agents had neither body cameras nor dashboard cameras. Whatever other footage exists has not yet provided the public with a conclusive account of the seconds before the shooting.
On July 13, an ICE officer shot and killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man, in Biddeford, Maine. Agents were surveilling an address linked to someone subject to a final order of removal. Guerrero left the address in a vehicle, and agents attempted to stop him. DHS said he tried to flee and that an officer fired because he feared for public safety. Homeland Security officials later acknowledged that Guerrero was not the person named in the warrant. Guerrero lived nearby with his wife and young daughter. Immigrant-rights organizations said he was authorized to work in the United States. The agents in Biddeford were also operating without body cameras. Security footage from the area has not yet resolved the central questions: where the officer was positioned, whether Guerrero’s vehicle posed an imminent threat, and whether deadly force was necessary.
There are still (too) many questions to be answered. Self-defense is a serious claim. A driver not the target of an operation can still endanger an officer, and a vehicle can become a weapon. Witnesses can misperceive chaotic events. Video can obscure as much as it reveals. Uncertainty, however, does not require moral silence. It certainly does not require deference to the institution that fired the bullets, controlled the scene, issued the first statement, and failed to equip its agents with the most basic instrument of public accountability.
This is what we do know: two men are dead, and neither was the person ICE had gone to arrest. In both cases, an encounter initiated by federal agents became lethal within moments. In both cases, the government’s defense rests on the claim that a frightened driver turned his vehicle into a weapon. In both cases, the officer survived to explain his fear, while the other man did not survive to explain his.
An institution with the power to surround civilians in unmarked vehicles, confront them with armed agents, and make fatal decisions in seconds must be held to an extraordinary burden of explanation. It must show that its methods are guided by restraint, prudence, and a fear of taking innocent life. Instead, ICE has asked the public for trust while failing to provide any evidence that would make such trust reasonable.
This is where Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys comes in. Not because an ICE operation is identical to a Jim Crow reform school, or because every federal agent resembles the sadistic employees of Whitehead’s Nickel Academy. The comparison, for me, is more institutional and moral. Whitehead’s novel shows how an organization created in the name of justice learns to produce injustice while continuing to believe in its own goodness. It shows how violence takes on respectable language, how innocent individuals disappear into categories, and how a system protects itself by trying to pin the blame on the victims for what was done to them. The deepest horror of Nickel is not that everyone inside it is consciously evil; the horror is that evil has become so integral to administrative standard operating procedures that it is normalized.
A School with a Good Name
Nickel Academy calls itself a “school”… its first and most important lie. It has classrooms, dormitories, job assignments, athletic fields, administrators, and written rules. Its public purpose is rehabilitation: to reform delinquency through discipline and to return troubled young men to society as responsible citizens. Nickel does not describe itself as a place where children are terrorized. It speaks of education, character, and reform. Its cruelty enters the world already masquerading as virtue.
Elwood Curtis arrives at Nickel after accepting a ride in a car he does not know is stolen. He is intelligent, earnest, and inspired by recordings of Martin Luther King Jr. He truly believes the moral claims America makes about itself can become real. His idealism does not stem from ignorance of racism; it comes from the conviction that injustice can be exposed by forcing the country to confront the gap between its principles and its behavior.
Nickel has official rules, but they don’t really govern the school; they merely lend it legitimacy. The actual order is maintained through a hidden curriculum of racial hierarchy, forced labor, stolen supplies, favoritism, and violence. Boys are taken to a building known as the White House [gasp!], where beatings are administered out of public view, their cries drowned out by an industrial fan. Some boys return wounded, while others mysteriously disappear. Administrators describe this brutality as “discipline” because that is the category the institution has assigned to it. A beating becomes punishment for insolence, fighting, escape, or failure to adjust; the child’s injuries then serve as proof that he was difficult enough to require correction. Nickel is a reform school, so whatever it does must be “reformative.” The boys are delinquents, so whatever they say is presumptuously unreliable. The adults are officials, so their account receives the authority of the state before anyone questions it.
Colson Whitehead’s genius lies in recognizing that institutional violence requires more than just a few violent men. It needs clerks who keep the files, supervisors who approve the punishments, businesses that profit from the boys’ labor, inspectors willing to turn a blind eye to the frightened faces, and citizens who assume that children behind a fence must belong there. The sadist swings the belt, but the system is sustained by everyone who finds it convenient not to ask what the belt is for.
Whitehead based Nickel on Florida’s Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a state institution that operated for more than a century. Former students described beatings, sexual abuse, forced labor, and deaths concealed by officials. Archaeologists later discovered more burials than official records indicated; the graves laid bare the institution’s entire moral architecture. The state possessed the children, disciplined them, documented them, and sometimes buried them. It controlled both the violence and the language used to describe it. That control is what Elwood tries to break. He records Nickel’s corruption because suffering must somehow escape the closed world in which the perpetrators write every report. His faith in evidence extends to his faith in justice: if decent people learn the truth, he believes, they will be compelled to act.
What brought me back to this novel amid the recent ICE shootings is its lessons in moral attention. Look beyond the institution’s state sanction. Follow the gap between its mission and its practices. Listen closely when official language tries to sanitize violence. Notice who is presumed credible before all the evidence is known. Above all, ask what the institution does when it harms the wrong person. Does it submit to judgment, or construct a story in which the victim becomes responsible?
The Wrong Target
Elwood’s catastrophe begins with simple proximity. He is near a stolen car, so the machinery of justice zeros in on him. His intention, character, and lack of actual criminality are irrelevant once the state places him inside the category of “delinquent.”
The shootings in Houston and Biddeford began with a similar collapse of distance. Salgado Araujo drove a van associated in some manner with an address under surveillance. Someone in or near the van resembled another person. Guerrero emerged from an address connected to someone else’s removal order. Neither was the man sought by the agents, yet each became subject to an armed intervention because institutional suspicion deemed “close enough.” Mind you, these were not random emergencies to which ICE responded. Federal agents created the circumstances through surveillance, pursuit, and confrontation. The civilians had seconds to understand why armed, masked men were surrounding them and whether those men were who they claimed to be. That asymmetry should, first and foremost, call for exceptional restraint on the part of the agents. Instead, the public is told to regard confusion as proof of guilt. A person flees, and their flight confirms suspicion. A driver tries to maneuver away, and the vehicle becomes a weapon. Panic generated by the operation is then used to justify the force with which the operation concludes. Just like at Nickel, the bruises are evidence of the delinquency.
This is the moral obscenity of the phrase “targeted enforcement.” The word promises precision: verified identities, careful planning, and minimal risk to anyone not subject to the warrant. Yet the people killed in Houston and Biddeford were not the targets. The discrepancy lies between a government that knows whom it is confronting and one willing to make lethal decisions while still figuring that out. The administration would prefer the public to enter the story only after the vehicle moves, when every preceding choice vanishes and the officer’s fear becomes the only fact that matters. By then, the institution had selected the location, brought the weapons, chosen the formation, initiated the stop, and created the confusion.
A law enforcement officer’s fear matters, but it cannot serve as a pretext that turns every killing into “a good shoot.” Fear is subject to error, prejudice, and institutional conditioning. An armed officer may sincerely perceive a threat that his own tactics helped create. Sincerity can explain a fatal decision, but it doesn’t absolve a system that made such decisions foreseeable.
Administrative Language
The most chilling language after an institutional killing is often the least emotional: “An officer discharged his weapon.” “The vehicle attempted to flee.” “The situation escalated.” This narrative is an insidious moral strategy. It’s as if this type of institutional violence were a weather system passing through the scene. Whitehead understands this administrative passive voice quite well. Nickel does not beat children; “discipline is administered.” Boys do not expose abuse; they “make allegations.” Children do not vanish into graves; they “run away” or “disappear from the record.” Once the institution controls the nouns and verbs, it can make cruelty sound like bureaucracy.
ICE’s rhetoric belongs to the same family of linguistic bullshit. Salgado Araujo did not become frightened while armed, masked strangers boxed in his van; he “weaponized his vehicle.” Guerrero did not drive away from men who had mistaken him for the subject of their operation; his vehicle “attempted to flee.” These phrases may or may not ultimately describe conduct supported by the evidence, but their immediate use organizes public sympathy before the public can see what happened.
All of this is reinforced by the political ecosystem in which ICE operates. The Trump administration has not exactly presented immigration enforcement as the sober application of law to complex human circumstances. It has framed migration as an alien invasion and turned removal operations into spectacles of national purification. Arrest totals become proof of our national resolve to keep out the riff-raff. The immigrant appears not as a person caught in a history of poverty, family, and fear, but as a contaminant the state must remove.
Language like this gives the institution a moral atmosphere. When a government describes a population as an invading force, encounters with its members begin to resemble combat. When every press release (and “presidential” tweet) associates immigrants with murderers, rapists, and gang members, the difference between a violent criminal and a construction worker without legal status becomes easier to ignore. That is how administrative evil protects its conscience. It never baldly asserts that some human lives have no value. It constructs a category whose members appear to have less value, then calls whatever happens to them enforcement.
Two fatal shootings in six days do not prove every charge we might bring against ICE, but they make the institutional question impossible to dismiss. Both operations involved the wrong person. Both ended with an officer shooting into a vehicle. Neither officer wore a body camera. The administration’s response has not been public contrition over catastrophic failures of identification. It has been a defense of the officers, a repetition of euphemisms, and a promise that investigations will eventually tell us what Fox News has already suggested we should believe.
A government serious about justice should be horrified that its agents killed two people they had not intended to arrest. It would not treat mistaken identity as a footnote canceled out by the driver’s final movements. It would ask tough questions about how the agents could have created such an encounter, whether their tactics amplified the danger, and why an agency conducting armed operations still lacks cameras.
Catholic Social Teaching and Compliance
Catholic social teaching (despite anything “theologian” JD Vance might say) does not deny the legitimacy of borders, law enforcement, or political authority. But it places each under the judgment of human dignity and the common good. The state has the right to regulate immigration, and migrants have obligations to the countries that receive them. Laws matter because social life requires order, responsibility, and institutions that protect the vulnerable. Catholic teaching is not an invitation to sentimental lawlessness; it is a refusal to make law an idol.
Catholicism begins with a claim more radical than citizenship: the human person is created in the image of God. That dignity is neither awarded by government nor earned through usefulness, good behavior, legal status, or national belonging. A person may be arrested, tried, imprisoned, or deported, but no consequence removes him from the human family. Even guilt does not make him material for the state to process carelessly. Many American Christians abandon this principle as soon as immigration enters the conversation. They affirm the sanctity of life in the abstract, then introduce qualifications when the life belongs to someone whose legal status they disapprove of. They speak about the image of God in church on Sunday but about “illegals” the other six days of the week.
Make no mistake: a Catholic cannot claim that every life possesses inviolable dignity and then treat immigration status as a license for reckless state violence. A Catholic politician cannot invoke “law and order” as if the phrase trumps moral responsibility. A Catholic commentator cannot repeat invasion rhetoric, dismiss the dead as lawbreakers, and remain faithful to a tradition that judges public policy by the dignity of the person. If you respond to state-sanctioned street killings with “this is what I voted for,” please stop calling yourself “pro-life” … you aren’t.
Rome maintained law and order by crucifying Jesus. The proceedings included officials, charges, testimony, political calculation, and a state-authorized execution. Pilate did not need to hate Christ personally; he needed only to decide that one expendable life was a reasonable price for social stability. That alone should make Christians unusually suspicious of state power, not reflexively obedient to it. Badges do not confer moral purity. A chain of command does not dissolve moral responsibility. A warrant is not a sacramental, and an official press release is not scripture. The Christian response cannot be that “the men should have complied.” Compliance may be prudent, but it is not the foundation of human dignity. Nor can Christians assume that authority must be telling the truth because the alternative makes us uncomfortable. Truth sometimes destabilizes institutions that deserve to be destabilized.
Nickel Academy prized compliance, too. Its boys were expected to obey rules designed by men who stole from them, beat them, and sometimes killed them. The institution interpreted resistance as further proof of delinquency. Elwood’s moral courage was refusing to let obedience go so far that it was complicit with dishonesty.
What the Graves Remember
Human remains were found where Nickel denied they would be. The bodies exposed what the official story tried to conceal, as if the earth itself cried out for justice. Nickel could try to manipulate the record, but it could not make the boys cease to have existed. The graves transform the novel’s understanding of memory. Remembering is resistance to the institution’s attempt to maintain authority over the meaning of the lives it destroyed. Naming the boys returns to them something the school tried to remove: the right to be known as persons rather than cases, delinquents, or unfortunate incidents.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a person before he became the subject of an ICE statement. He was a father, a builder, and a man whose adult life unfolded in Houston. Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was a husband, a father, and a worker before he became the driver of “a vehicle” in the government’s account.
Justice now requires more than cursory internal reviews. Every available recording, radio transmission, operational plan, warrant, forensic report, and vehicle record should be preserved and made available to independent investigators. Body cameras must be mandatory during ICE enforcement actions. Agents should be clearly identifiable, and the use of unmarked vehicles, masks, and tactics likely to make civilians believe they are being attacked or abducted should end. Vehicle stops should be designed to de-escalate rather than to entrap or surprise. Deeper reforms must address the moral ecology of enforcement. Arrest quotas and publicity campaigns that reward volume and spectacle are disgusting. The “invasion” rhetoric that conditions the public to dehumanize victims needs to end. The administration cannot portray immigration as “war” and then pretend it isn’t responsible when officers behave as though they are operating on a battlefield.
Nickel Academy existed for more than a century. That it lasted so long is not proof that it was necessary; it’s just proof that institutions can outlast every moral justification for their existence. Whitehead does not allow us to call Nickel a “good institution marred by occasional misconduct.” The abuse was too extensive, the concealment too deliberate, and the hierarchy too essential to the school’s operation. Systems with such a grotesque and deeply embedded hidden curriculum cannot be trusted to self-reflection and reform.
We must at least ask whether ICE is approaching a similar threshold.
The Nickel Boys does not allow us to reduce evil to individual rogue actions, because those are too easy to disown. Most people do not see themselves as hateful, and most institutions do not write cruelty into their mission statements. But an institution responsible for justice must remain vigilant about its own capacity for injustice. It must approach force with humility, document its actions, submit its claims to independent examination, and grieve when its power destroys the very person it was not even seeking. Colson Whitehead shows where institutional hubris leads. It leads to reports no one questions, punishments no one witnesses, and graves no one marks. It leads to a system so convinced of its moral high ground that murder becomes its own evidence of the victim’s guilt.
A nation reveals its soul through what it does when its institutions kill the wrong person. It can investigate, repent, and change, or it can construct an explanation, defend the system, and resist self-reflection.
Either way, the earth will reveal the truth one day.