The portraits carried into the Hart Senate Office Building have become part of a wider demand for independent investigations, access to evidence, and political accountability for deaths linked to ICE operations.
The action inside the Hart Senate Office Building ended with arrests, but the portraits did not disappear with the protesters.
Following the Women’s March “Abolish ICE” die-in in Washington, D.C., the faces continued to circulate online, in photographs, in the press, and across activist networks. They have become part of a visual archive documenting a crisis that remains politically and legally unresolved across the United States.
The first article published by Channeldraw described the moment when protesters entered the Senate office building carrying my portraits of people who had died in ICE custody or during immigration enforcement operations.
The images were held upright like gravestones, transforming the atrium into a temporary memorial.
But the action also raised a question extending far beyond that building: what happens after the names have been spoken and the protesters removed?
For several of the people represented in the portraits, families and civil rights organisations are still waiting for complete access to evidence, independent investigations, and public accountability.
The investigation into Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death
One of the portraits carried during the action depicted Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 31-year-old man from Mexico who was killed by an ICE officer in Houston on 6 July 2026.
Federal authorities initially said that Salgado Araujo had driven a vehicle towards officers and that an agent opened fire because he feared for his life. Questions, however, quickly emerged about that account.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare subsequently announced that his office would conduct its own investigation. According to the Texas Tribune, local investigators collected surveillance footage and other evidence, but the federal government retained control over important parts of the case.
The Office of Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security is leading the federal investigation, while the FBI is reportedly examining the alleged assault on the ICE officer.
Salgado Araujo’s relatives and community organisations have called for an investigation that is genuinely independent of the agency whose officer fired the fatal shots.
His death was reportedly at least the eighth connected to the intensified immigration enforcement campaign. In several previous cases—including those of Renée Good and Alex Pretti—video evidence and eyewitness accounts challenged elements of the government’s initial descriptions of what happened.
As of July, the Associated Press reported that no immigration officer had been criminally charged in connection with these deaths.
A pattern of delayed and disputed information
The portrait of Ruben Ray Martinez points to another problem: how long it can take for the public even to learn that ICE was involved in a person’s death.
Martinez was killed in Houston in July 2025, but ICE’s involvement became widely known only much later, following the release of records obtained by American Oversight.
The government maintained that Martinez attempted to run over federal agents. Attorneys representing his family argued that the video evidence did not support that account.
A grand jury declined to indict the officer, but the case illustrates the structural imbalance surrounding these investigations. The agency involved controls much of the evidence, publishes the first official narrative, and may remain the principal source of information about its own use of force.
The problem is therefore not limited to individual shootings. It concerns who is permitted to construct the public record—and how difficult it can be for families, journalists, local authorities, and civil rights organisations to challenge that record.
The drawings respond to this imbalance through another language. They cannot replace investigations, testimony, forensic evidence, or judicial proceedings. But they can resist the disappearance of the people involved.
Demands for independent investigations
Following the deaths of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, a refugee from Afghanistan, Refugees International called for the immediate publication of video footage, dispatch communications, autopsy findings, and other evidence.
The organisation also called for independent investigations and Congressional oversight hearings, extending its demand for accountability to the deaths of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and Ruben Ray Martinez.
Its statement argues that investigations controlled primarily by agencies within the Department of Homeland Security cannot, by themselves, restore public trust.
These demands give additional meaning to the location chosen for the Women’s March action.
The protesters did not carry the portraits into an ICE detention centre. They carried them into the Senate—an institution with the authority to investigate federal agencies, hold public hearings, demand documents, question officials, and determine how much funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection receive.
The action turned the Hart Senate Office Building into more than a setting. It identified Congress as one of the places where responsibility must be exercised.
A proposal to abolish ICE remains stalled
The political demand expressed by the banners also has a legislative dimension.
The “Abolish ICE Act,” introduced in the House of Representatives on 15 January 2026 as H.R. 7123, proposes dismantling the agency and transferring some of its functions elsewhere within the federal government.
According to the official Congress.gov record, the bill was referred to several committees but has not advanced beyond that stage.
The distance between the urgency expressed by protesters and the speed of the legislative process could hardly be greater.
Inside the Hart building, the words “ICE Kills” and “Abolish ICE” occupied several floors of the atrium. Below them, protesters carried the dead into the political space through their names and illustrated faces. Police officers then removed the demonstrators, while the institution continued its ordinary work.
That contrast is central to the action: the urgency of death confronting the slowness of power.
From portraits to a counter-archive
The drawings were originally created to restore individuality to people who are frequently reduced to statistics, legal categories, or brief news reports.
“My drawings portray people who died in ICE custody not as numbers or headlines, but as individual lives: faces, bodies, families, and stories that deserve to be remembered,” I explained after the protest.
Once printed and carried by other people, however, the portraits acquired a new function. They were no longer simply illustrations published online. They became physical witnesses.
They entered the photographs taken by Kristine Jones They appeared beside police uniforms, plastic restraints, security barriers, monumental architecture, and protesters lying on the floor.
Each photograph created a relationship between a person who could no longer be present and an institution being asked to answer for that absence.
This is what makes the images a counter-archive. An official archive may contain incident reports, internal communications, legal statements, autopsies, and surveillance footage. The portraits preserve something those records frequently exclude: the insistence that every case begins with a human being.
The action is not over
The protesters were arrested, the banners were removed, and the Hart Senate Office Building returned to its normal appearance. But the political questions raised by the action remain unanswered.
Who investigates an agency when its officers kill?
Who controls the evidence?
How long should families wait for videos, autopsy reports, and the names of those responsible?
What does Congressional oversight mean if hearings are not held and information remains inaccessible?
And what happens when deaths accumulate more quickly than institutions respond?
The portraits cannot answer these questions. Their purpose is to prevent them from being forgotten.
They continue to circulate because the cases remain open—not necessarily in a courtroom, but in the public memory. Every time one of the drawings is printed, shared, carried, or displayed, the person represented returns to the public space.
The action inside the Senate building lasted only a few hours. The demand embodied by those faces has not ended.
