The Congressional Hispanic Caucus will hold a hearing in Houston to hear eyewitness accounts and other testimony related to the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo after he was shot last week by a federal immigration agent.
The field hearing will be held with members of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security on July 24. Democrats have sharply criticized the investigation into the ICE shooting in East Houston, accusing federal authorities of boxing out local investigators and providing few details to lawmakers.
Federal officials alleged that Salgado had “weaponized” his vehicle and tried running over ICE agents. Eyewitness accounts from Salgado’s brother and two other men who were in Salgado’s van disputed that claim.
“(The witnesses) say the agents never identified themselves and no officer was ever standing anywhere near the front of a van,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia said during a news conference Tuesday morning. “So Lorenzo’s family is being asked to trust an agency that killed him, when he wasn’t a target, had no criminal history (and) the officers never identified themselves.”
After Salgado’s death, ICE agents shot and killed a man in Maine during what officials have now said was another case of mistaken identity. U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said the back-to-back killings should compel Congress to reexamine funding for the immigration-enforcement agency.
“In both cases, ICE admitted that neither men were not the targets of enforcement,” he said. “I think there’s a reason for that, because they have contracted people who are essentially bounty hunters, as well as their regular agents, to look for people in beat-up work trucks, to look for Latino men early in the morning and coming home at night.”
A spokesperson for the ICE office in Houston previously said ICE does not hire so-called bounty hunters, and those assertions jeopardize the legitimate work of agents in the field.
Castro, who has been a key figure in calling for ICE to shut down the Dilley family detention center in South Texas, called on lawmakers Tuesday to dissolve ICE and freeze funding for the agency.
“We have to disband ICE in this Congress,” he said. “We have to freeze their hiring. We should give them no more money. Congress has to use every leverage that it can to change ICE’s behavior. Otherwise, these killings will continue. There will be another victim in a few days or a few weeks.”