Marlom Portillo knows the dead well.
“Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán was a tourist and he was killed by a semi running from ICE,” he says, pointing to a white cross with a man’s photo taped to it. Portillo waves to another cross: “Geraldo from Cuba was murdered, by asphyxiation, in a detention facility in Texas. And Orlin. He should be alive. ICE detained Orlin’s mother and left him to be beaten to death by his uncle. March 4, 2026. He was 2.”
Portillo tallies each name and circumstances of every death on an Excel spreadsheet, each death is confirmed through official government reports and lists, and cross-checked with human rights groups’ own reporting.
His list begins on Oct. 24, 2024, with Jose Manuel Sanchez-Castro, a 36-year-old Mexican national who died in ICE custody, and continues down 76 columns, attributable to what Portillo calls the “ICE Deportation Killing Machine.”
It’s the number of fatalities cited by advocacy and local groups as they honor lives lost during immigration enforcement and detention operations since January last year.
“I’ve been calling it that because now we have 75 deaths, 75 people who had the right to live,” Portillo said. “And the worst part is we are normalizing their deaths. They want us to forget. But guess what? We will never forget. And we have to be loud and we have to say, ‘No more killings. no más muertes,’” Portillo said.
About 50 people stood outside Home Depot in Pasadena last Saturday in the 102-degree heat to protest ICE deaths and honor the most recent dead: 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed on his way to work by an ICE agent in Houston on July 7; and Johan Sebastian Guerrero, 25, shot by an ICE officer in Maine during a traffic stop on July 13.
The gathering at Home Depot was one of 300 National ICE Out Day of Action nationwide on July 25.
The 75 deaths are just those the American public knows about, said Monrovia community activist Sherri Lochner, who is working to build a permanent memorial to Roberto Carlos Montoya, the 52-year-old Guatemalan day laborer struck and killed by an SUV on Aug. 14, 2025. He was fleeing from ICE agents at the Monrovia Home Depot.
“People don’t deserve to die just because of their immigration status,” Lochner, 64, said. “In detention centers, conditions are inhumane, and they’re meant to dehumanize, it’s so wrong on so many levels.”
Almost a year after Montoya’s death, Lochner said she is still calling for the release of a California Highway Patrol report on Montoya death. She also announced a vigil at Monrovia’s Home Depot set for Aug. 15 to honor Montoya’s first death anniversary.
Monrovia City Manager Dylan Feik said at the July 26 City Council meeting that the CHP had requested a 30‑day extension in response to a records act request for the investigative report into Montoya’s death.
Speakers at Saturday’s vigil in Pasadena included Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of NDLON; the Rev. Rosa Cándida Ramírez, pastor at La Fuente Ministries in Pasadena; Vice Mayor Jess Rivas of the Pasadena City Council; and Jean Grant, director of development and strategic partnerships at the Immigration Resource Center of San Gabriel Valley.
“The truly dangerous thing is that the administration has conflated being an immigrant with being a criminal resulting in needless deaths of hundreds of innocent people at the hands of ICE,” Grant said. “This reckless disregard for human life has unleashed terror on our community and we will not stand by and let it happen.”
It’s a grass-roots sentiment that has grown in immigrant-heavy Southern California neighborhoods since June of last year, when the Trump administration’s major crackdown began in the region.
In an effort to mass deport the “worst of the worst” undocumented criminals, thousands of immigrants have been arrested, deported and/or detained – a dragnet that Trump officials say is working, as evidenced by major reductions in illegal border crossings.
But many local groups and immigrants themselves have long pushed back. The federal dragnet has netted people are often not the kind of worst-of-the-worst officials pledged to arrest.
The shooting deaths in Houston and Maine have sparked calls for ICE to immediately start wearing uniforms or vests that clearly identify them as “ICE” instead of the more generic “POLICE” or “POLICE ICE.”
Civil rights groups and advocates have often criticized ICE for not wearing uniforms or clear identification on their ballistics vests identifying them as deportation officers.
After the Maine shooting, Homeland Security temporarily stopped officers from conducting vehicle stops except in specific situations. But the day after fierce criticism from some MAGA supporters, President Donald Trump said on social media that traffic stops should continue.
Homeland Security said last week that it was adding new training in crowd-control measures, high-risk vehicle stops, live-fire exercises and medical training, in response to what they called coordinated attacks against their officers and ICE facilities.
As for the vigil?
“The First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly – not rioting,” said a written statement to the Southern California News Group from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. “DHS is taking reasonable and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers. ICE officers are facing a nearly 1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest murderers, rapists, and gang members.”
Craig Higa, 75, of Pasadena, repurposed a sign he made calling for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, the Salvadoran immigrant the Trump administration wrongly deported last year. A federal judge later cleared Garcia of all criminal charges, describing the Trump administration as abusing its prosecuting power.
“We have to celebrate the little victories that we get,” Higa said. “Kilmar is home.”
The retired mold maker started volunteering with NDLON six months ago, helping distribute supplies at its food bank every Friday, and attending protests and vigils. As a Japanese American, Higa said there are dark parallels between what’s happening in the country today and what happened in 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the imprisonment of more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, many of them American citizens, in internment camps during World War II.
“My mother was in her 20s and she spent four years in Idaho, in Minidoka concentration camp,” one of 13,000 Japanese Americans sent there, Higa said.
And while the Japanese American community held on to its principle of “gaman,” to endure with dignity, the people outside Home Depot chose joy. Even standing in front of 75 white crosses. Especially standing in front of 76 white crosses, Higa said.
“It’s just us together, you know,” he added. “These things don’t last without joy. NDLON brings the truck by and they bring the music, and there’s joy. So, as sad as these things are, as tragic, we find joy in being together. Because how else can you get, how else can you go on, right?”
Omar Leon, lead singer for NDLON’s band, Los Jornaleros del Norte, knelt in front of the crosses while singing, “Solo de pido a Dios,” “I Only Ask for God,” with its lyrics: “I only ask of God, that pain not leave me indifferent.”
Jose Madera, director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, which is part of NDLON, said Rolando, one of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s three sons, appeared in a National ICE Out Day of Action online meeting that helped launch hundreds of vigils nationwide on July 25.
Amid the collective mourning and collective indignation, while fathers, brothers, uncles and family die in “spaces of hate,” Madera said he asked one thing.
“Rolando said, ‘When you speak my father’s name this weekend, can you please speak it with joy?’”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.