Lorenzo Salgado Araujo<\/a>, the Houston man killed by ICE this week, was ending.<\/p>\nThe prayers had been prayed. The crowd had chanted, \u201cShame! Shame!\u201d Rep. Al Green had announced that, yet again, he\u2019ll file a motion to impeach Donald Trump. The candles were blown out, and the fluorescent lights at the Service Employees International Union came back on.<\/p>\n
But the cameras kept rolling. Salgado\u2019s sons were there, and they had things to say.<\/p>\n
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The older brother, Ronaldo Salgado, the teacher, described his dad. Lorenzo was a shy, hard-working man, a soccer fan, \u201cEast End through and through.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lorenzo was dark-skinned, and he hated the assumptions people made about him. \u201cI\u2019m not stupid,\u201d he\u2019d say. \u201cSoy cabr\u00f3n\u201d \u2014 I\u2019m a badass \u2014 \u201cy mis hijos son cabrones tambi\u00e9n\u201d \u2014 and my kids are too.<\/p>\n
Ronaldo didn\u2019t exactly look like a badass, not at first. He wore a blue polo shirt with red and white trim. He\u2019s a teacher at Eastwood Academy, in the neighborhood where he grew up, and he\u2019s proud to teach kids who are like the kid he used to be \u2014 first-generation, from working-class families, kids who believe that if they work hard in this country, they can succeed.<\/p>\n
But as Ronaldo spoke, you could see his family\u2019s steeliness. He\u2019s fighting now to get his father\u2019s things back from ICE \u2014 his white van, his wallet, his lunchbox. Ronaldo imagines that lunchbox sitting in some government warehouse, with the lunch his mom packed rotting away.<\/p>\n
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His mom wants that lunchbox back, he said. She wants to wash it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope you\u2019re thinking that I\u2019m making my father proud,\u201d he said, his voice cracking. \u201cBut I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever believe that if I don\u2019t hear it from him.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few minutes later, Ronaldo\u2019s little brother, Lorenzo Salgado Jr., came to the front of the room, hugged his brother and whispered a private joke. Lorenzo Jr. wore a green Mexico jersey \u2014 their dad was a soccer fan \u2014 but when he unexpectedly turned to speak to the crowd, it was the United States of America he wanted to discuss.<\/p>\n
Lorenzo Jr. reads history. And history, he said, repeats.<\/p>\n
Abraham Lincoln, he said, is his favorite president. Lincoln saved the union, kept the country together when it was in danger of breaking apart, held the country to its lofty ideals.<\/p>\n
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We\u2019re supposed to be a place, Lorenzo Jr. said, where all men are created equal, where they\u2019re endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among those rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad had that here,\u201d he said. Lorenzo Sr. had life \u2014 a good life, with his family. He had liberty, mostly \u2014 even if that didn\u2019t include the ability to travel back to Mexico. And he definitely had pursuit of happiness.<\/p>\n
Right now, Lorenzo Jr. said, is a hard moment to be an American. But the response to his father\u2019s killing, by agents of our own federal government, swells his heart with pride.<\/p>\n
We the people will bring justice, he said.<\/p>\n
We the people must stick together.<\/p>\n
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We the people are America.<\/p>\n
Lorenzo Salgado, you thought, would have been proud of his sons. Those cabrones are fighting for him. For the America he wanted for them. For the America we all deserve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lorenzo Salgado Jr. and Ronaldo Salgado, sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, spoke Saturday at a vigil honoring their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-371236","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\/371236","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=371236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}