In less than a week, two people have died during encounters with ICE — one in Texas and another in Maine. The incidents have put immigration enforcement back in the headlines and raised new questions about how ICE is carrying out President Donald Trump’s promise of an aggressive immigration crackdown, and what he has called the largest mass deportation effort in American history.
The renewed scrutiny ICE is facing comes during a moment of transition inside the Department of Homeland Security. Under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, immigration enforcement was loud: High-profile raids. Border Patrol agents deployed alongside ICE. Made-for-TV operations that produced dramatic videos, went viral online, and frequently led cable and local news broadcasts. After months of criticism, Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin, who has continued pursuing many of the same immigration goals with a noticeably quieter public profile.
The killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston has become one of the first major tests of DHS’s quieter and more professional approach. Following the second fatal shooting in Maine, ICE announced Tuesday it was putting a halt to its practice of traffic stops. But the Houston killing remains a revealing flashpoint,
Houston Public Media reporter Bianca Seward has been covering the shooting from the beginning. She told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that her reporting has continued to evolve over the past week as witnesses have come forward, competing accounts of the shooting have emerged, and local officials have clamored for the opportunity to conduct their own investigation.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
So let’s just go back to where this whole thing started, which I believe is almost a week ago, Tuesday morning, July 7. What happened on Tuesday to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo?
Yeah. Well, we’ve learned a lot over the last week as to what exactly happened Tuesday morning and there’s still a lot of outstanding questions, but I can take you back to Tuesday afternoon when the first time we heard about the shooting. We had a very small statement from ICE just kind of detailing their very short account of what happened. And according to an ICE spokesperson, they were attempting to do a targeted enforcement operation, arrest Salgado Araujo, and they say during that traffic stop, during that moment, during that encounter, they claim that Salgado Araujo was weaponizing his vehicle, attempting to evade arrest, attempting to ram an ICE officer with his car when the officer fired his gun. He was shot in the abdomen and then taken to Ben Taub Hospital, a hospital here in Houston, where he later died of his wounds. But it wasn’t until the early afternoon when we, the public and reporters, began to hear about what had happened. And at that moment we had very little to go off of.
Did people initially take that account as the, you know, unimpeachable truth or was there immediately suspicions that there may have been another side of the story?
It was almost immediate that immigrant rights organizations like LULAC and the family were disputing the account. Mostly we just didn’t have a lot to go off of. We had the very short statement from ICE and we had almost no details from the family. The family themselves were looking for more answers. It took them a while to figure out what had happened to their father, when he had passed. So a lot of outstanding questions Tuesday night and the calls for accountability, transparency began immediately.
So how long does it take until we get a differing account of what happened on Tuesday morning?
The next morning we started to hear from the family. Two of Salgado Araujo’s sons, Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr., spoke to the public and started to offer just details about who their father was and that they believed their father would have complied, that he was trying to just go to work and they didn’t believe that their father would be acting aggressively, ramming his car or attempting to evade arrest. They said it didn’t sound like [their] father, but it would take a few more days before we got any more credible accounts about people who were in the car with Salgado Araujo.
And when did that happen and what did they say?
On Thursday, we started to see reports online that the detainees, the men who were in Salgado Araujo’s car, who were also detained by ICE, started to kind of come out through their lawyers, speak out about their experience. On Friday, the lawyer for two of the men who were detained, Hugo Balderas, said that the accounts given to him by his clients completely conflicted with what ICE’s versions of the events were. Essentially they were saying that at no time was there an ICE agent in front of the car, that [the ICE agent approached] the side of the car, that the shots [were] fired from the side of the car, basically discredited the idea that Salgado Araujo was ramming his car with an officer or was ever trying to run an officer over. They alleged that the account happened completely from the side and that the officer fired immediately upon exiting his vehicle.
How does the city respond to this differing account?
Yeah, there’s been a lot of calls for Houston Police Department to do an independent investigation, for anybody on the Houston official level to launch an investigation. And it’s kind of unfolded over the week in a bit of a confusing manner, I think, for the public. [Harris County] District Attorney Sean Teare did say that he was launching his own investigation, that he was collecting evidence, that he was asking for surveillance video. We ourselves have seen people from the district attorney’s office going to different gas stations in the area and other businesses to ask for surveillance footage. But the problem that Teare is outlining is that they haven’t been invited by the federal authorities to collaborate or work alongside them. So Teare is clear that he may not be privy to all of the evidence that federal authorities do collect during their own investigation. Right now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is leading the inquiry, but their investigation is clearly into the potential assault on law enforcement. It doesn’t say that it’s into the shooting as a whole to find exactly what happened.
And how is ICE responding to this account that disputes theirs?
We’ve asked repeatedly about allegations that their account is not fully accurate or that it’s missing details or that it implies that Salgado Araujo was behaving in a way that he might not have been. And we’ve gotten no answers. We haven’t got any kind of comment about the allegations that the account is not credible or if they wanna add any more to their initial statement.
So how are we gonna find out the truth?
It’s gonna be a difficult process and part of the thing that complicates that is that ICE and DHS has said that the officers on the scene were not wearing any body cameras and they had no dash cam video of the incident. So they’re saying that the ICE agents on the ground have no video to share with the public. We are starting to see clips on social media from those surveillance videos, from the footage at gas stations or from witnesses who were filming as well, circulate online that show different parts of the shooting and different parts of the encounter, but we’re still not getting the most full, clear picture yet.
Could you tell us about this individual, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo? Who was he?
From what we’ve learned from his sons, he got to Houston in the early ’90s and has been here since working in construction, helping build homes in the Houston area. They said, you know, he would go to work all day, come home and be with his family. You know, he’s the father of three sons, all of whom have gone on to college and are now working in teaching professions or as engineers. They describe him as a shy man. A man who loved his family, a man who cared for his sons, a man who loved the Chivas soccer team from Mexico.
And was he undocumented? Did he have warrants out for his arrest or anything of that sort?
As far as we can tell, we’ve done our searches within Harris County and in other databases that we found no criminal record so far. And the sons also say that there was no criminal record for him, that he hadn’t had any issues with the law. He was undocumented. But they, the sons, shared with us last week that he was working to obtain a work permit, so could have been on the path. His sons were all born here in the United States, so are themselves citizens. And I think the family was starting to look at ways to legitimize their status here.
And was ICE after him on Tuesday morning or was this like a case of mistaken identity or what?
Well, no. Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of their investigation. They did say that they were targeting another man and Salgado Araujo was picking up men on his way to work. So [a] DHS spokesperson has said that they were targeting another man that they believe got into the van with Salgado Araujo. It’s not clear if they were correct, if the man that they were targeting was the man that got in the van. They have confirmed that Salgado Araujo was not the intended target, that his brother who was in the car was not the intended target. But they haven’t come out and said that, yes, it was one of the other men who had final removal orders or had an administrative warrant out for his arrest. They just say that they were targeting an individual and they believe he got in the car with Salgado Araujo, which is what prompted their chase.
Houston obviously is not Minneapolis, but there are some similarities between what happened here and I mean, most obviously I think, what happened to Renee Good in Minneapolis, if you think about someone behind a car and ICE’s account, which says that, you know, an agent was at risk from someone behind the wheel of a vehicle. How is Houston responding?
There [have] been protests and vigils this week. And they’re kind of latching onto that confusion too. The similarities of the narratives, not only with Renee Good being accused of ramming her vehicle into an ICE officer agent and later the video showing that that was not necessarily the case. But it’s also happened here in Texas in South Padre Island. A year ago, another man was accused of ramming an ICE officer and the video didn’t really conclude that to be the case. So this is a narrative that Houstonians have heard before and immigrant rights office case organizations immediately find suspicious. They don’t have trust in the organization. They don’t have trust in the narrative. And they want more transparency. They want accountability. They want to know what happened.
Do you see any signs that the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo might lead to changes in how ICE is operating in Houston?
It’ll be hard to tell. This is an organization that’s been really emboldened by the Trump administration. So it’ll be hard to see if there will be motivation to change practices. One thing that we did learn is that Rep. Sylvia Garcia [D-TX] said she spoke with acting ICE Director David Venturella, specifically about the lack of body cameras on these agents. He promised her that all agents in the field would have body cameras by the end of the month, but a DHS spokesperson later clarified it would be within 60 days. So that may be a change that we see coming on the horizon. When we asked DHS about why the agents weren’t wearing body cameras, they blamed the quote, “Democratic government shutdown.” They said it takes time and money to outfit these agents. And, because of the government shutdowns, they were held up in distributing the cameras.