What happened
An ICE agent fatally shot a Houston man in his car early Tuesday during a “targeted enforcement operation,” the agency said in a statement. “From information we are receiving,” Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, “refused to follow multiple verbal commands and weaponized his vehicle,” causing the agent to fire “in self-defense.” Local officials and civil rights groups demanded that ICE release all video footage as part of an independent investigation.
Who said what
Araujo’s family said the father of three was a construction worker who had been in the U.S. for 35 years and was in the process of getting his work permit. In most of the 20 recent cases where immigration agents have shot people in their cars, The New York Times said, officials said it was justified “because the vehicles had been ‘weaponized’ and the agents’ lives were in danger.”
ICE’s account of Araujo’s killing “echoed many of the statements the agency quickly issued in other shootings,” The Washington Post said. But in the killings of Renee Good in Minneapolis, 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas and “several” other instances, video evidence established that “the officers were not in danger and, in some cases, acted as the aggressors.”
What next?
ICE said the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General is investigating Araujo’s shooting.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a father of three and in the process of getting his work permit
