We still don’t know exactly what happened in the moments before Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last week. The patchwork of available surveillance video doesn’t show the full timeline. The three other men in the van with Salgado directly contradict ICE’s claims that Salgado was trying to hit them with his van.
But we do know one thing, what happened was bad policing. Plain and simple.
Not only does Salgado not have so much as a parking ticket from Harris County on his record, but the federal agents who said they were conducting a “targeted” operation acted more like would-be robbers than professional law enforcement.
“This is an individual driving to work and he gets run off the road by two cars with no insignias and a bunch of ununiformed people jump out,” Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told Houston Public Media last week. “These are not tactics that I’ve ever seen and I taught at HPD’s police academy for 10 years, some of my best friends are tactical officers that have been so for decades. This isn’t the way that they’re taught to do this.”
It’s hard to imagine the terror Salgado, who had members of his construction crew in his work van with him, must have felt in that moment. His son told the Texas Tribune that one of his greatest fears was being robbed of his tools.
The federal agents didn’t just drive unmarked cars and not wear uniforms, they got out “with large weapons in an area that historically has been prone to aggravated robberies,” Teare said. “In what world is this individual not allowed to try to escape when absolutely it could appear that that person was being robbed at gunpoint utilizing cars?”
That’s not some hypothetical. Houston-area crooks have tried to take advantage of the chaos created by ICE’s lack of professionalism. In Galveston, a man was arrested earlier this year after illegally detaining someone while pretending to be an ICE agent. And the Texas Department of Public Safety is currently on the lookout for a man impersonating a cop while pulling over drivers north of our city in an unmarked Jeep — not unlike the Jeep that ICE agents drove in their deadly pursuit of Salgado last week.
We’ve called ICE a rogue agency. New hires with little training who are reportedly given arrest quotas have created a mockery of an agency that was once respected for its thorough and careful approach to immigration enforcement. They’ve hidden evidence about Salgado’s killing — we still don’t know the names of the officers involved, Teare said this week. Its militarized tactics in Chicago and Minneapolis were not only fatal but also relatively ineffective at actually rounding up “the worst of the worst.” Reckless enforcement in Maine has resulted in another immigrant being shot to death by ICE. He had a two-year-old daughter.
ICE isn’t even following its own internal standards. The Department of Homeland Security prohibits officers from shooting drivers unless the driver poses an imminent threat, and officers are also prohibited from “intentionally and unreasonably” placing themselves in positions where they have no choice but to use deadly force.
With ICE agents killing two people in one week by shooting at moving vehicles, it’s hard to believe these internal standards are being followed by individual agents.
How can ICE expect anyone else to follow the rules when they can’t follow their own?
Congress tried to bring the agency to heel, requiring them to lose the masks and identify themselves. Republicans stood in the way and instead gave them a whole bunch more funding. And agents still aren’t wearing body cameras.
“They have lost the trust of the American people,” Congressman Christian Menefee said last week.
The district attorney’s office is conducting an investigation into the shooting. Good. But we still need real reform of this agency that is an insult to professional law enforcement everywhere. Friends of the Salgado family are demanding the passage of a Lorenzo Salgado Araujo act to hold ICE accountable to the public. That would be a worthwhile first step.