The fatal shooting of a 52-year-old Mexican national by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during a traffic stop in Houston early Tuesday morning has reignited long-simmering controversy over the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration agenda as the government and witnesses offer differing accounts of what took place.
After the incident, the Department of Homeland Security said that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest, putting the officer in mortal danger.
“He rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer,” DHS wrote in a statement released Tuesday.
Three witnesses who were with Araujo inside the van he was driving, including his younger brother, are now being held in immigration detention facilities. They say the agency’s account is false.
“All three of my clients reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger,” Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, an attorney who visited each of the men individually, said during a press conference Friday. “That is simply false.”
DHS has said the ICE agents on the scene were not wearing body cameras and that their vehicles were not equipped with dashboard cameras. No footage of the shooting, whether from eyewitnesses or surveillance cameras, has surfaced publicly. The limited video that has been released only shows specific moments before and shortly after the incident.
Araujo is at least the eighth person to be killed during enforcement actions by federal immigration officers since the Trump administration launched its aggressive immigration crackdown early last year. In several of those incidents, including the January killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, video footage appeared to contradict federal authorities’ accounts of what happened.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said Friday that his office has launched its own investigation into Araujo’s death, adding that he will go to “the ends of the Earth” to discover the truth.
Four Houston-area members of Congress, including Reps. Al Green and Sylvia Garcia, have also called for an “immediate, fully independent, and transparent investigation” into the shooting. On Friday, Green said he and his Democratic colleagues would use every lever of power available to them to ensure that all of the evidence in the case comes to light.
“We don’t have to ask. We don’t have to beg. We don’t have to plead. We don’t have to beseech. We don’t have to grovel. We can demand,” he said.
What we know about the shooting
Early Tuesday morning, ICE officers were conducting an enforcement operation in a predominantly Hispanic Houston neighborhood when Araujo was driving to work at a nearby construction site. Araujo was not their intended target, the agency said, but he “resembled” the man they were seeking and was driving a white van similar to the vehicles that had previously been seen at the target’s property.
After spotting the van, the officers, who were driving unmarked SUVs without sirens or lights, attempted to pull it over. Low-resolution surveillance video from the area appears to show Araujo’s van making an abrupt U-turn after a black SUV pulls alongside. The van then backs up briefly before traveling a short distance down the street and pulling over to the side of the road.
ICE has not specifically described what happened after its officers approached the van once it had pulled over. According to Balderas-Ibarra, the officer fired into the van from the side, rather than the front, where he would have been in the direct path of the vehicle.
Araujo was struck in the torso. He died hours later at a nearby hospital.
Social media video from after the shooting shows Araujo lying face down on the ground with his hands behind his back while multiple ICE agents kneel over him. The other three passengers are on the ground on the opposite side of the van, also in handcuffs. None of the video footage released so far shows any clear damage to the ICE vehicles involved in the incident.
Who was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo?
Araujo was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the U.S. for more than three decades. He was the father of three children, all U.S. citizens, and owned a construction business. He had no criminal record and was in the process of seeking legal residency, according to his family.
His son, Ronaldo Salgado, described him as a quiet man who worked hard and loved his dog.
“That’s how I want the world to know my father. Not as someone who got shot and killed, but as a family man, a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work,” he said during a press conference on Wednesday.
A pattern of disputed shootings
The disputed facts surrounding Araujo’s death echo the aftermath of other fatal shootings by ICE since the start of President Trump’s second term. In January, DHS accused both Good and Pretti, who were killed in separate incidents during widespread anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, of being domestic terrorists who were actively attempting to harm or kill immigration officers. Video from both incidents, which had been exhaustively dissected after the shootings, raised questions about those official accounts.
Two of the other fatal shootings involved suspects who, like Araujo, were accused of attempting to run over immigration officers with their vehicles. In both cases, body camera footage released afterward appeared to contradict key elements of the administration’s account of what happened and why officers said lethal force was justified.
In a separate, nonfatal incident in February, a Chicago woman was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent who claimed she had rammed into the vehicle he and other agents were riding in. The woman, Marimar Martinez, survived and was charged with attempting to assault federal officers. The charges were later dropped, and bodycam footage released months later appeared to show the agents initiating the collision between their vehicle and hers.