Candles lit during a vigil in honor of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man shot and killed the previous day by an immigration agent, on Wednesday, July 8, 2026, in Houston. (AP Foto/Mark Felix)
Mark Felix/AP Photo/Mark Felix
On Wednesday, when Ronaldo Salgado choked back tears describing his father’s last hour on Earth, District Attorney Sean Teare wasn’t in the audience.
It wasn’t an oversight. Amid plaintive calls for a transparent investigation into the shooting death of longtime Houstonian Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Teare wanted to remain impartial, he explained to Houston Public Media on Thursday. Teare’s investigators were on the ground Wednesday gathering as much evidence as possible. And his office is the first local one to confirm that they are conducting their own parallel investigation, even though it wasn’t “invited” to do so by a federal authority.
“We’re going to look at every avenue and if a state crime was committed, be it a murder, be it a manslaughter, be it tampering with evidence,” Teare said Thursday. “We are going to investigate it and if someone committed that crime, you don’t get to hide behind a badge.”
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It will be a difficult effort but a necessary one. Federal authorities have not shared evidence or information with his office, Teare said.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare speaks to members of the media following a bail evidentiary hearing for Aundre Matthews, who is charged in the fatal stabbing of Baytown High School student Andrew Meismer, in Houston, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026.
Raquel Natalicchio/Houston Chronicle
Under the Trump administration, federal law enforcement agencies like ICE have been caught misrepresenting the truth and outright lying on numerous occasions. To the press. To judges. To the American people.
ICE still hasn’t made any videos public, and the Department of Homeland Security says officers weren’t even wearing body cameras. They haven’t released the names of those officers involved. They stripped Lorenzo’s body of identification and sent him to the hospital as a John Doe, according to Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Eyewitnesses who were with Lorenzo when he was shot are now being pressured to self-deport, Proaño said.
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This follows a pattern of what we’ve seen in the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, both killed in Minneapolis, and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez in Chicago, where, instead of investigating, the federal government turned to stonewalling and silence.
The response to Trump’s disastrous immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis offers a roadmap for what local investigations should look like — and what they can accomplish.
Local authorities there were forced to do their own police work after ICE agent Christian Castro shot Julio Sosa-Celis on Jan. 14. The federal government called their efforts a “political stunt.” Four months later, the agent was charged with four felony counts of second-degree assault and one misdemeanor charge for lying about a crime.
What happened in the intervening months is exactly what’s possible here: Local officials did their jobs. The local police department, the county attorney, the state attorney general and its bureau of criminal apprehension worked together even when federal authorities attempted to shut them out. And if critics here still don’t think it’s possible, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office even created a handy how-to video with snazzy music. Teare said he’s been in touch with their office and will “continue to lean on them.”
Studying Minnesota’s response, however, provides a stark contrast to what’s happened here in Houston since Salgado was killed Tuesday morning.
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There, on Jan. 14, as soon as a 911 dispatcher told the Minneapolis Police Department about an ICE-led car chase in north Minneapolis, the police took remote control of a municipal camera in the area, pointing it at the driver’s home. The Department of Homeland Security’s official account of what happened next is that the driver got out of the car and fled to the front yard where another individual was on the porch with a shovel. The ICE agent who pursued the driver into the yard claimed that two men hit him in the head with an ice shovel and a broom while he tried to detain the driver who had slipped on the icy lawn. Lying on the ground beneath the blows, the agent claimed he drew his gun and shot as the men retreated into the house.
That’s not what the local investigation concluded. The police department’s critical footage did not show anyone hitting the agent with a weapon, according to the complaint. It did show that the agent was alone in the front yard when he shot into the house, striking Sosa-Celis’ leg and hitting the wall of a child’s bedroom. There were four adults and three children in the home at the time. Additional interviews corroborated the footage.
At the scene, more ICE agents fired off tear gas, stormed into the house and detained four people. Local police responded to calls of a gunshot and called state investigators for help.
Federal authorities quickly “stymied all further efforts” by local officials to gather evidence and interviews.
But the local officials persisted.
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“Nobody is above the law, including ICE agents,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in May when the state charges against Castro were filed.
We don’t yet know if charges would be appropriate here in Houston. But we do know that nobody is above the law here either. And we know from the example of Minneapolis, that a city and its police department can play a key role in holding federal officers accountable. A grieving family deserves answers. A community deserves transparency. And Houston deserves leaders who stand up for us.