Marcelo Lucero’s killing returns to the spotlight 18 years later: ‘The violence is back, but now it comes from ICE agents’

He wears a light pink dress shirt and a blue suit. It’s an important day.

At 4 p.m., in Washington, D.C., Joselo Lucero takes his seat. He’s in a building that’s located on F Street Northwest. In the room, sitting around him, there are lawyers, the staff of the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the president of the LatinoJustice organization, representatives of the U.S. government, along with other attendees of the public hearing being held by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

Among all those present, Joselo Lucero is the only one who will break down in tears.

He has waited for this moment for almost two decades, ever since his brother, Marcelo Lucero, was the victim of a hate crime that set off alarm bells on Long Island and throughout New York. The murder occurred 18 years ago, but no one can assure Joselo that it could not have happened yesterday, today or next week.

Joselo takes the floor: “No immigrant family should ever have to go through something like this: learning that my brother was killed because he looked like me. I’m a citizen of this country, but I don’t feel safe, not in 2008 and not in 2026.”

The chair of the commission announces Oswaldo Marcelo Lucero et al. v. United States, Case No. 13.735, which is the first of its kind to come before the IACHR. It is seeking to have the U.S. government acknowledge its responsibility in the death of an Ecuadorian migrant on November 8, 2008. That was when Manuel Lucero was killed by a group of seven teenagers, who called themselves the “Caucasian Crew.” The argument is that there was a systemic failure behind the killing of a single individual: authorities had never meaningfully confronted the anti-Latino hate rhetoric that helped make such violence possible.

Joselo takes the microphone. He’s asked not to speak for too long, but to explain, for all those following the case, who his brother was, what happened that fateful night and what impact his death has had on the entire family.

Joselo begins reliving, as he has done so many times over the years, the moment he learned that his 37-year-old brother, the eldest of Doña Rosario’s four children, would no longer be there to share dinner with the family or call from his nearby home on Long Island, in Suffolk County, to check in on him or ask when he would be coming home. Marcelo, he says, was a “very strict” older brother.

Doña Rosario raised her children largely on her own in Gualaceo, about 21 miles east of Cuenca, Ecuador, after their father died when they were still young. She made food to sell, and her children helped her. “She taught us the values of hard work and respect for others. But also the value of education,” Joselo says.

Marcelo was the first of the siblings to leave Gualaceo. Back in 1993, he traveled as far as New York City. He was 24 years old. “My brother’s decision to come to the United States is the same one made by many young people in our countries: he wanted to a better life and to help his family.” Joselo followed him almost two years later. He had just turned 20.

At the time, there was no sign of what lay ahead, that he would one day become the person desperately seeking justice for his murdered brother.

On Sunday, November 9, 2008, Joselo was at home when a detective from Long Island knocked on the door. At first, he didn’t answer.

“He was looking for a relative of my brother, but back then, you didn’t trust the police. The same thing is happening now,” he says. The detective asked if he had any connection to Marcelo. Joselo replied that yes, he was his brother. The detective asked to come inside and talk. “At that moment, I felt that something bad had happened.” Indeed, the detective confirmed that the previous Saturday night, Marcelo had been fatally stabbed.

“That moment completely changed my life. It’s something you never wish on anyone. A person was murdered for doing absolutely nothing, just walking down the street. It’s the worst news you can give a mother. My mother was devastated; she got sick,” Joselo recalls.

Around midnight, his brother was returning home after finishing his shift at a local dry cleaner. His friend, Ángel Loja, was with him. Near the Patchogue train station, a group of teenagers approached them and began hurling racist insults. It later came to light that this wasn’t a random act, but rather a deliberate tactic they used “for sport.” They routinely targeted Hispanics, knowing that most didn’t report the incidents to the police, for fear of being arrested themselves.

Around that time, between 2003 and 2006, reported hate crimes against Latinos in Suffolk County increased by nearly 40%. By 2007, 61% of all hate crimes in the county targeted Latino victims, according to data from the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center.

So, confident that nothing would happen, they went after Marcelo. When he tried to defend himself, 19-year-old Jeffrey Conroy pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the chest. “I started to hear this sound, a loud sound. It was blood rushing out of him. It sounded like a faucet running,” Loja later told a Suffolk County court.

Joselo’s life changed forever. “I gave up everything. I spent all I had to spend. I quit my job as a welder and found a part-time job,” he explains. He wanted justice. He wanted the authorities — the Department of Justice and the FBI — to focus their attention on what had happened to his family, something that, for quite some time, had been happening to an entire community.

In the days after the killing, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy told the press that the incident was a “one-day story,” implying that it was an isolated event and not a hate crime. But Joselo knew this wasn’t the case. “The evidence was there. Many people were attacked during that time, people had been abused at their jobs, on the street. Unfortunately, all those reports didn’t come to light until after my brother died,” Joselo points out.

In the apartment where he now lives in Queens, a portrait hangs on the wall showing the grief-stricken face of his mother, Doña Rosario, when she traveled to New York to participate in the first trial held over her son’s death. That was after the Department of Justice opened an investigation into hate crimes on the East End of Long Island and the role of the police in these incidents.

In the photograph, Joselo embraces his mother: he’s trying to comfort a woman who ended up surviving the death of her eldest son by only three years. After his murder, she suffered a stroke, developed Parkinson’s disease and died.

No one visits Joselo’s home without stopping to look at the photograph from the day that Conroy — the man responsible for the murder — was sentenced to 25 years in prison, after being found guilty of manslaughter as a hate crime. Later on, the other teenagers were each sentenced to between five and eight years in prison.

“That moment in the photo is a sad one, but it’s a moment of justice,” Joselo affirms. “It was the moment I realized that this fight was not mine alone, but belonged to many people.”

That day, when the trial for his brother’s death ended, he told himself, “The hunting of Hispanics is over, at least, for now.” But with time, he says, he was forced to revise that belief. “Now, the hunting of Hispanics has begun again,” he laments.

Almost 18 years later, his brother’s death has, once again, cast a shadow over the neighborhood. It has affected his friends and acquaintances, as well as all kinds of people like them. “I know many people who are suffering. Some aren’t going to work. There are lines of people at the consulates signing powers of attorney to leave arrangements for their children. They’re closing bank accounts,” Joselo sighs. Since his brother’s murder, he has visited schools throughout New York City to talk about preventing bullying and hate crimes among students.

“People don’t feel safe here,” he says. “It’s unfortunate that when we’re needed, we’re welcome. But when we’re not needed, we’re criminals. We’re not moving forward; we’re going back to the past. And the past is my brother’s story. The only difference is that back then the attackers were teenagers. Now they’re immigration agents.”

The Lucero Case before the IACHR

The hearing that was held this month before the IACHR was the first of its kind, in which the commission publicly examined whether the United States has fostered a climate that encourages discrimination and violence against Latinos in the country.

“The anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric of politicians and government leaders has created this climate, which has empowered people who believe in hatred and division; it has empowered them to commit these crimes,” Rafaela Uribe, lead attorney in the case, tells El PAÍS. She appeared in Washington alongside representatives from LatinoJustice. “The government creates opportunities for police to racially profile communities: this is an environment where Latinos and migrants are treated as criminals simply for existing. So, this climate is truly the reason why we submitted the petition and why it remains so relevant today, especially today.”

Particularly painful for both the Lucero family and their legal representatives is the fact that, nearly two decades later, the country has not only continued to witness crimes targeting the Latino community, but now also sees detention centers filled with migrants, a rising number of deaths in custody, and politicians in Washington continuing to vilify a community they have turned into a political enemy.

In the last 10 years, nothing has changed for the better: the figures show that hate crimes against Latinos have increased by more than 200%.

“The aggression, the arrests, and the use of excessive force by the police and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents have been on the rise, so this is something we believe that, as a society and as a country, we have the power to change,” Uribe says.

“Our country has a responsibility to protect,” he continues. “Through this anti-immigrant climate, the state has violated people’s dignity, and that means that under the law, people are not being treated as equals; under the law, they are not being respected. What we are asking for — and what we want to see happen — is for the commission to examine this climate, this context, and to determine the responsibility of the U.S. government, as well as that of all governments around the world, to respect the dignity of migrants.”

On behalf of Joselo Lucero, the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and LatinoJustice requested that IACHR order financial reparations to the family; eliminate the 287(g) agreements, which allow state and local police agencies to carry out certain immigration enforcement functions on behalf of ICE; and increase educational programs focusing on respect for diversity.

If the IACHR determines that the United States bears responsibility for Marcelo’s death, it would be the first time the commission has held a government accountable for its hateful rhetoric.

“That would be extremely significant on the international stage, especially because this is not only a problem we are seeing in the United States,” the attorney says. “Across the world, countries are becoming increasingly hostile to immigration and criminalizing migrants. Such a ruling would state clearly that governments do bear responsibility for protecting the human rights of these communities. Marcelo was murdered simply for being a Hispanic man walking down the street. We’re seeing that violence back on our streets again, but now, the people responsible are ICE agents, masked individuals we do not know, acting with the authorization of our government.”

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