Washington, DC – On Tuesday morning, masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles stopped Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as he drove to pick up his construction crew in Houston’s Magnolia Park. Minutes later, an agent shot and killed him. Salgado Araujo had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and, according to his family, was working to secure legal status. ICE claimed he rammed an agency vehicle, but no video has surfaced showing that.
This is the same script that ICE ran in Minneapolis. In January, after agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good, federal authorities lied about the circumstances and withheld evidence from state investigators. Now in Houston, federal authorities are controlling every aspect of the inquiry into Salgado Araujo’s death, the same obstruction Minnesota faced.
His death marks at least the eighth fatality tied to federal immigration agents in our streets since the administration’s latest enforcement surge began. Agents have fired into or at civilian vehicles at least 21 times since last July. In case after case, no agent has faced consequences.
Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, issued the following statement:
“This is the same playbook the Trump administration used in Minneapolis, and now it has cost Lorenzo Salgado Araujo his life. A masked agent in an unmarked car killed Lorenzo in his own neighborhood where he lived for 35 years working and raising a family. Like Minneapolis, local Houston law enforcement is being locked out of its own investigation to get at the facts. This is what unaccountable, unrepentant, unconstitutional enforcement looks like. How many more families have to bury a father, a mother, a son before Trump and Miller’s mass deportation machine is held accountable? Congress and DHS owe the Salgado family the truth about what happened, and they owe every family in this country an end to the killing in our streets.”
