{"id":389846,"date":"2026-07-28T23:30:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T23:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/389846\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T23:30:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T23:30:14","slug":"new-us-attorney-for-southern-district-of-texas-outlines-priorities-comments-on-ice-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/389846\/","title":{"rendered":"New US Attorney for Southern District of Texas outlines priorities, comments on ICE investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"

HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Aaron Reitz took the oath of office earlier this month and, in his first statement, wrote that “Things are about to get very bad for criminals in the Southern District of Texas.”<\/p>\n

Reitz is the top federal law enforcement officer in the Southern District of Texas – an area that includes 43 counties and 10 million people. It stretches from Houston to the U.S. southern border.<\/p>\n

“It’s a fascinating job. We’re very, very busy,” Reitz told ABC13 in his first television interview since taking the job July 9. “‘You’ve got the full diversity of case types. You’ve got all of the major corporate, white collar, high dollar international that are coming out of Houston all the way down to the valley where you’ve got border security matters, drug trafficking, human trafficking.”<\/p>\n

He defines his approach as aggressive and says immigration enforcement is a top priority.<\/p>\n

“We’re here to do the basics of enforcing law and order and doing justice, and we take that job very seriously,” Reitz said.<\/p>\n

He took office just two days after the ICE shooting death of undocumented immigrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.<\/a> DHS said Salgado Araujo was not the target of their enforcement operation but tried to run over an officer with his van. Witnesses have refuted that, but Reitz said his office is among the agencies investigating what happened and they want the truth.<\/p>\n

“The investigation is still ongoing,” he said. “We draw no conclusions from what happened. Obviously it was a tragedy. But right now we don’t know much. We have reason to believe it is not the hysterical, vigilante sort of justice that was happening.”<\/p>\n

As for a judge’s Monday ruling that ordered the release of a witness<\/a> to the shooting from federal custody, Reitz said it does not change the nature of the ongoing investigation.<\/p>\n

“This was a decision made by a judge that, frankly, as a legal matter doesn’t necessarily affect or implicate the merits or the substance of what did or didn’t happen,” he said. “We want to get to the truth. We want to know what happened. We want to piece together the timeline. We want what happened and what didn’t happen. We’ve been transparent about that from the get-go.”<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Aaron Reitz took the oath of office earlier this month and, in his first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[137392,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-389846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-137392","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389846","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=389846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}