{"id":369272,"date":"2026-07-11T08:31:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T08:31:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/369272\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T08:31:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T08:31:19","slug":"ices-fatal-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-in-houston-raises-serious-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/369272\/","title":{"rendered":"ICE\u2019s fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston raises serious questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Thursday, during a traffic stop in Houston<\/a>, Immigration and Customs Enforcement<\/a> agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo<\/a>, a Mexican national who lived in the United States for 35 years. Salgado is at least the 10th person<\/a> to be shot and killed by ICE<\/a> and Customs and Border Enforcement officers since the start of the second Trump administration \u2014 and the 17th Mexican to either be fatally shot by ICE or to die in ICE detention, a death toll that has prompted the Mexican government to formally demand<\/a> an investigation.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly by now, ICE\u2019s account of the shooting and the subsequent behavior of its agents are raising multiple red flags.<\/p>\n

To start, ICE said the shooting was justified because Salgado \u201cweaponized his vehicle,\u201d jargon for saying he tried to run over the officers who stopped his white van. But as The New York Times was quick to point out, this is a common claim made by ICE to justify its violence, but one that has repeatedly\u00a0fallen apart<\/a> under scrutiny. Already the three men who were passengers in the van driven by Salgado are disputing ICE\u2019s account<\/a>, saying that Salgado never swerved and that ICE officers fired almost immediately upon stopping the van.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it is not clear if this growing mainstream distrust of ICE\u2019s defense of violence will translate into any more accountability for ICE.<\/p>\n

In this case, refuting the officers\u2019 claim may be tricky \u2014 but only because the officers were not wearing body cameras. An ICE spokesperson blamed the lack of cameras<\/a> on \u201cback to back Democrat [sic] shutdowns,\u201d but, of course, the Republicans controlled Congress during those shutdowns, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act gave ICE so much money (roughly $75 billion) that it was essentially unaffected by the shutdown<\/a> in the first place. And perhaps most important, it was the Trump administration itself<\/a> that was working hard to thwart the rollout of bodycams.<\/p>\n

On top of this, the lawyers of the men ICE arrested in Salgado\u2019s van \u2014 the ones claiming vehicular \u201cweaponization\u201d never happened \u2014 are alleging that ICE is putting pressure<\/a> on them to self-deport. This would, of course, make their testimony harder to obtain. And perhaps even more troublingly, ICE officers stripped Salgado<\/a> of all his identification before putting him in the ambulance after shooting him, which delayed identification after he died at the hospital.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At this point, none of this should come as a surprise. What is surprising to me is the extent to which the media has covered this shooting with much more immediate skepticism than they usually seem to initially bring<\/a> to incidents of police violence. The Times, for example, immediately noted<\/a> that ICE had no evidence for its claim, and PBS coverage introduced ICE\u2019s claim with a headline that noted ICE officers \u201cdon\u2019t provide evidence<\/a>.\u201d The Washington Post reframed the entire issue, making the dispute of ICE\u2019s claims the headline of its article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This swift wariness of ICE\u2019s account is well-earned, given the agency\u2019s increasingly documented acts of seeming deception and dishonesty, certainly when it comes to claims of \u201cvehicle weaponization\u201d in particular<\/a>, but more broadly as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPlay<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Perhaps most famously, ICE\u2019s claim in Minneapolis that Renee Good attempted to run down ICE agent Jonathan Ross was carefully debunked<\/a> by the Times. A federal judge in Chicago dismissed two charges involving allegations that someone tried to ram ICE agents, when the case fell apart so completely that the Justice Department had to request<\/a> that the charges be dropped. In Maryland, the local police took the unusual step of openly contradicting an ICE account of events, noting that a car passenger ICE said suffered whiplash when the driver allegedly tried to drive over the agents had been arrested hours before and was already in ICE custody<\/a> when he was injured. In fact, last year another federal judge in Chicago explicitly said<\/a> that ICE\u2019s dishonesty over \u201cweaponized vehicle\u201d incidents during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago made it \u201cdifficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that [ICE] says\u201d (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"\"\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\tJohn Pfaff\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\tJohn Pfaff is a professor of law at the Fordham University School of Law. He is the author of “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.”\t\t<\/p>\n

\"MS<\/p>\n

\u00a9\u00a02026 Versant Media, LLC<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last Thursday, during a traffic stop in Houston, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-369272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}