{"id":372551,"date":"2026-07-14T14:15:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T14:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/372551\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T14:15:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T14:15:35","slug":"in-houston-and-maine-2-ice-shootings-in-1-week-demand-a-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/372551\/","title":{"rendered":"In Houston and Maine, 2 ICE shootings in 1 week demand a response"},"content":{"rendered":"

We still don\u2019t know exactly what happened in the moments<\/a> before Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent last week. The patchwork of available surveillance video doesn\u2019t show the full timeline. The three other men in the van with Salgado directly contradict ICE\u2019s claims that Salgado was trying to hit them with his van.<\/p>\n

But we do know one thing, what happened was bad policing. Plain and simple.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ctargeted\u201d operation acted more like would-be robbers than professional law enforcement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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,\u201d Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told Houston Public Media<\/a> last week. \u201cThese are not tactics that I\u2019ve ever seen and I taught at HPD\u2019s 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\u2019re taught to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The federal agents didn\u2019t just drive unmarked cars and not wear uniforms, they got out \u201cwith large weapons in an area that historically has been prone to aggravated robberies,\u201d Teare said. \u201cIn 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not some hypothetical. Houston-area crooks have tried to take advantage of the chaos created by ICE\u2019s lack of professionalism. In Galveston, a man was arrested earlier this year<\/a> after illegally detaining someone while pretending to be an ICE agent. And the Texas Department of Public Safety<\/a> is currently on the lookout for a man impersonating a cop while pulling over drivers north of our city in an unmarked Jeep \u2014 not unlike the Jeep that ICE agents drove in their deadly pursuit of Salgado last week.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve 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\u2019ve hidden evidence about Salgado\u2019s killing \u2014 we still don\u2019t 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 \u201cthe worst of the worst.\u201d Reckless enforcement in Maine has resulted in another immigrant being shot to death by ICE. He had a two-year-old daughter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

ICE isn\u2019t even following its own internal standards<\/a>. The Department of Homeland Security<\/a> prohibits officers from shooting drivers unless the driver poses an imminent threat, and officers are also prohibited from \u201cintentionally and unreasonably” placing themselves in positions where they have no choice but to use deadly force.<\/p>\n

With ICE agents killing two people in one week by shooting at moving vehicles, it\u2019s hard to believe these internal standards are being followed by individual agents.<\/p>\n

How can ICE expect anyone else to follow the rules when they can\u2019t follow their own?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t wearing body cameras.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey have lost the trust of the American people,\u201d Congressman Christian Menefee said last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The district attorney\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We still don\u2019t know exactly what happened in the moments before Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372552,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-372551","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\/372551","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=372551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372551\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}