ICE Killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They Were Looking for Someone Else. Every Witness Says They Lied.
The New York Times reported that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the intended target — they were hunting two immigrants from Guatemala. Two people familiar with the matter told the Times that agents had been searching for two Guatemalan immigrants and believed one of them may have been in the van.
He was not Guatemalan. He was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. His son said he’d lived here for 35 years and was attempting to obtain a work permit. He was on his way to finish construction on several Houston homes. He drove a white work van. ICE saw a white work van. They stopped the wrong one.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is dead because an ICE agent looked at a white van, decided someone inside it resembled a Guatemalan national they were looking for, and opened fire. “Officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop,” a Homeland Security official told CNN.
Resembled the target. A man who had lived here for 35 years, who was working with lawyers to obtain legal status, who was driving to a construction job, is dead because he was driving the right color van in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time.
What the Witnesses Said
“That is a lie,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, said in a handwritten statement offered to the Washington Post by his lawyer. “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.”
The three men who were detained gave consistent accounts of the incident in separate interviews while being held separately in immigration detention. “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” their attorney said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”
Victor Salgado, the victim’s brother, 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?”
After learning Salgado Araujo had been shot in the right side of his abdomen, a forensic expert said investigators will need to explain how that aligns with ICE’s account that an agent fired because they feared being run over. “There’s going to have to be some pretty good clear indication and explanation of why this individual was shot from the passenger side on the right side,” the expert said. “I think that changes the perspective a little bit and changes the narrative. It complicates things.”
The DHS confirmed the ICE agents involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras. No body cameras. The wrong man. Every witness contradicting the official account. An agent mocking a dying man while he bled in the street.
He is the tenth person to be fatally shot by federal immigration agents since President Trump returned to office.
The tenth. In eighteen months.