Image via Movimiento Cosecha Grand Rapids. Donate here to support Mario’s family.
From No Detention Centers in Michigan’s statement at a Grand Rapids press conference on September 22nd:
We stand in solidarity and mourning with the family of Mario David Coronado Juárez, along with Movimiento Cosecha, GR Rapid Response to ICE, Grand Rapids DSA, and other members of this community. We are here to honor and uplift another life that ICE has senselessly stolen, and to call for this terror to end.
Mario should still be with us today. ICE is responsible for his death, and ICE is running rampant in our city. The killing of this beloved brother, husband and father must be understood in the context of a massive ongoing escalation in ICE violence across Grand Rapids, the region, and the country. With unprecedented funding from an administration that seeks to consolidate the white supremacist agenda built into this agency at its founding, ICE has been kidnapping our immigrant neighbors off the street at a shocking rate. They have a mandate from the federal government to target people based on what they look like, where they work, and the language they speak. They abducted more people in August 2026 than in any single month in their history, breaking the record previously set in July. They are tearing families apart every day. ICE killed Mario, just as this summer they killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. Two days ago, an agent in Austin, Texas shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, who is now in a detention center with a bullet lodged in his back.
After the murders in July, ICE briefly claimed to be ending vehicle stops, only to reverse this policy change on the direct orders of the president. If this change had remained in effect, Mario would still be alive today. But his death is another awful reminder that, with or without vehicle stops, no one is safe in ICE’s presence.
Here in Kent County, when ICE kidnaps someone, they are often taken to 517 Ottawa Avenue Northwest and then driven an hour and a half north to the GEO Group’s North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin. North Lake is the largest detention center in the Midwest, and it exists so that the GEO Group can profit from immigrants’ pain and exploit their labor. The facility is close to its capacity of 1,800 people, and those who are held there continue to share stories of medical crises going without treatment, inadequate food, abuse by guards, and other hellish conditions that we know are endemic to ICE detention. This past spring, in response to these conditions, hundreds of people held captive in Baldwin launched hunger and work strikes to demand freedom for all and the closure of all detention centers. Four months earlier, last December, Nenko Gantchev died at North Lake because of the GEO Group’s medical neglect, one of over 50 people who have lost their lives in ICE detention since the beginning of this administration.
Ten days ago, on Sunday, September 12th, over a hundred people gathered at the 517 Ottawa office to show support for members of our community who had just been abducted by ICE, and to expose the regular coordination between ICE, the GEO Group, and the Grand Rapids Police Department to take our neighbors to be caged at North Lake. We showed up because ICE has been terrorizing Grand Rapids, and now they have taken Mario’s life. Our thoughts are with his family. The struggle to establish sanctuary policies here in Grand Rapids and to abolish the inherently cruel and arbitrary system of immigration detention will continue. We join Movimiento Cosecha in demanding transparency and accountability for Mario’s killing and immediate steps to protect immigrant families in this community from ICE terror.
Abolish ICE.
