Bad. Very bad.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a Houston man after he tried to run over a federal officer conducting a vehicle stop Tuesday morning, according to an agency statement issued hours after the incident.
Federal agents were attempting to stop the vehicle as part of an unspecified “targeted enforcement operation” in a predominantly Latino neighborhood when Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — whom ICE identified as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — attempted to evade arrest, according to the ICE statement.
Salgado Araujo allegedly attempted to ram an ICE vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands and tried to run over the ICE agent before the federal officer fired his weapon in self-defense, the statement said.
The shooting comes after federal immigration agents have faced scrutiny for a series of fatal shootings of American citizens in the past year and a half, some of which roiled the nation and led to fierce criticism of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration enforcement.
Trump and his administration have routinely said they are targeting immigrants who have a criminal history, but the federal government’s data shows that a majority of the people ICE has arrested under the second Trump administration don’t have criminal convictions.
ICE’s description of the Houston shooting is similar to claims in other cases which were later contradicted by video evidence or eyewitness statements. In Texas last year, an agent shot and killed a man on South Padre Island. The agent said the man’s car slightly struck him and he feared for his life. Lawyers for the man’s family and a witness disputed the official account.
By late Tuesday, no law enforcement or bystander videos had been released or emerged to corroborate or contradict ICE’s description of the Houston incident.
The Houston Police Department said Tuesday its officers were not part of the ICE operation and they only showed up afterward to help with directing traffic.
[…]
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said the man’s family and her constituents “deserve a complete and transparent accounting” of the fatal shooting.
“ICE has released an initial account, but the facts must be independently and thoroughly investigated, including the circumstances that led to the use of deadly force,” Garcia said in a post on X. “All available footage, communications, and other evidence should be preserved and reviewed as part of a full and impartial investigation.”
Alejandra Salinas, a progressive Houston City Council member, echoed that call along with [Rep. Christian] Menefee, the Houston Democrat.
LULAC, the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization, started a petition demanding an independent investigation and requesting that “every piece of evidence” be released to the public.
The petition cites an unrelated case in Chicago in which a Border Patrol agent’s statements of firing in self-defense was disputed by video footage and his own text messages.
The Harris County District Attorney’s office said in a statement that the case was an “active federal investigation” but did not answer questions about whether its office was investigating the shooting or planned on presenting the case to a grand jury. It also did not answer a question about whether its civil rights division, which typically reviews police shootings in the county, has any staff assigned to investigate it.
“Our office will collaborate with federal authorities to ensure a thorough local review of the evidence,” the district attorney’s spokesperson Courtney Fischer said in a statement.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which investigates police shootings around the state, did not immediately respond to questions about whether it is doing its own probe into Tuesday’s shooting.
ICE and its lawless marauding never went away after LA and Chicago and Minnesota. They just got quieter about the bad things they were doing, in the hope that we’d lose focus on them. As for their claims about what happened here, we cannot take anything ICE says at face value, their track record of blatant dishonesty is far too long for that. I don’t know who else may be tasked with investigating what happened, but at this point it won’t be HPD.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire declined to seek a city-led investigation into the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, saying there cannot be a city investigation while a federal investigation is ongoing.
“We’re monitoring it very carefully,” Whitmire said. “It’s truly a tragedy… But there’s no involvement with HPD.”
Whitmire said it was a tragic, complex issue and his prayers go out to the family and the community that “feels the pain.”
[…]
A handful of city council members called for the city to conduct an independent investigation, despite the mayor’s decision.
“This is the City of Houston. What happens here is our responsibility as well,” said council member Edward Pollard. “We have all the right to ask for video footage in the area from any business owner, from any camera that is accessible to us, to be able to get witness statements, to talk to the community, to try and figure out what happened.
“We can’t just leave everything up to the federal government and sit back and hope that they will be transparent regarding their own agency and their own actions,” Pollard said.
Council Member Alejandra Salinas also called for a city-led investigation in an Op-ed in the Houston Chronicle.
“We owe Salgado Araujo and his family nothing less than truth, transparency and action,” Salinas wrote. “We must not allow ICE’s violence to become normal in the streets of Houston.”
Council Member Joaquin Martinez, who represents the Magnolia Park area, didn’t call for a city-led investigation, but said his office is in communication with U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia’s office, whose district also represents the area and is calling for an independent investigation.
“I want to reassure the community HPD was not there,” Martinez said. “It’s important to ensure we’re not conflating the two.”
Interim Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin echoed similar concerns, saying late Tuesday that her office,” stands ready to support our community and any local investigation into how this tragedy unfolded.”
The League of United Latin American Citizens launched a fundraiser for Araujo’s family Wednesday morning. LULAC has also called on HPD to lead an investigation into the shooting.
See here for ongoing updates from the Chron, here for CM Salinas’ op-ed, and here for what we know so far. If I were Mayor, I’d want my own people doing an investigation, so that I could feel confident I knew what was what. Perhaps Mayor Whitmire will change his mind on this.
I’m going to quote from the TPM Wednesday morning memo to remind us all why we need a real investigation.
ICE, which has been notoriously unreliable in providing accurate details of shooting incidents, issued a statement from its acting director with an interesting caveat that seems like a nod to its troubling track record (emphasis mine): “From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”
The shooting is being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office.
In an unrelated case in Nebraska last week, a Venezulean man pleaded guilty to one count of forcibly resisting arrest causing bodily injury as part of a plea agreement after the case against him for attempted murder of a federal officer fell apart. While DHS and federal prosecutors originally claimed that he had “violently attacked an ICE agent,” including choking her and slamming her head into the ground, video evidence of his arrest later contradicted those claims, Nebraska Public Radio reported.
The allegations made in the initial complaint were “at worst a misrepresentation and at best complete negligence,” U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter said during sentencing, adding that he found the law enforcement reports “embellished” and “troubling.”
The truth will eventually come out, and there will be justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and his family, and for so many others like them. I’d prefer that to be sooner, and the best way to make that happen is to be as proactive as possible about it. The Trib, Texas Public Radio, and Slate have more.
Abolish ICE is the moderate position.
re: “Houston Mayor John Whitmire declined to seek a city-led investigation into the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, saying there cannot be a city investigation while a federal investigation is ongoing.”
I’d like to see the legal citation for that one…
There are reports that ICE is trying to pressure the 3 witnesses in the van to self-deport. Why, if this is a justified shooting in self defense?