The men who were in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s vehicle when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed him on Tuesday say he did not try ram the immigration agents’ unmarked car—directly contradicting ICE’s version of events.The agents stated that Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who was on his way to work, had ignored their verbal commands, “weaponized his vehicle,” and tried to run over one of them. The agent shot him and claimed self-defense.“That is a lie,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, said in a handwritten statement offered to The Washington Post by his lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over.... There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.... Lorenzo thought we had lost them but suddenly they surrounded us.”Balderas-Ibarra said he spoke to Rojas and the two other passengers—Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Victor Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s brother—separately, and each stated that ICE lied about Salgado Araujo’s violent intent. Victor also said that agents began firing from their vehicle’s passenger side, striking his brother in the abdomen and then mocking him while he bled out, saying, “You wanted to escape, right?”All four men in the car had been in the United States for at least two decades. They were arrested and taken into custody shortly after the shooting.Not only do these witnesses say ICE is lying, the footage of the incident suggests they were too. Video obtained by local outlet KHOU 11 shows the agents tried to box Salgado Araujo’s car in with their unmarked black SUV, initiating the conflict. When Salgado Araujo made a U-turn and fled in the other direction, the agents (who could have been anyone to him, as they were in an unmarked vehicle) followed him. Even worse, The New York Times reported that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the intended target—they were hunting two immigrants from Guatemala. Now Salgado Araujo is dead for no reason. He is the tenth person to be fatally shot by federal immigration agents since President Trump returned to office.
On Monday, Ulises Peña López, represented by Disability Law United and Pangea Legal Services, sued the US government and private prison contractors GeoGroup and CoreCivic over his arrest by ICE officers and his following treatment in ICE detention facilities. Peña López was deported to Mexico in October 2025 after spending over six months in ICE […]
The federal immigration agents who shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican father of three in Texas, weren’t even looking for him.When ICE agents conducted a deadly traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, they were looking for two people from Guatemala, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. Agents believed one of the people they were looking for drove a white van—instead, they found Salgado Araujo and three men he was driving to work. Before conducting the traffic stop, federal agents knew they had the wrong man. They reportedly looked up the owner of the van and learned it was Salgado Araujo, who was undocumented. The supposedly “targeted operation” ended in ICE’s tenth fatal shooting this year.In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” But the other three men in the car who were arrested by ICE told their lawyer that was a lie—there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. Surveillance footage from the traffic stop also doesn’t support DHS’s claim. One video showed that agents boxed in Salgado Araujo’s car, before he attempted to U-turn and drive the other way. Another video showed that there was no damage to the ICE agents’ vehicle. In another potentially dark turn in the saga, the three men who were with Salgado Araujo are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in an interview with The New Republic.
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