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The three men who were in the van when federal immigration officials shot and killed a man in Houston, Texas, this week are strongly disputing the Trump administration’s narrative of the events and are being pressured to sign deportation orders, according to their lawyer and lawmakers.
The three men, who were arrested by immigration officials during the incident, denied that the driver of the vehicle, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, “weaponized” his vehicle against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. They also told their lawyer that there was never an ICE official in front of the van and that the shots that killed Salgado came from the “sides” of the vehicle.
On early Tuesday morning, while Salgado, his brother and two men were heading to work in Houston, he was shot and killed during a “targeted enforcement operation” by ICE officials. It is the latest shooting by federal immigration officials amid the Trump administration’s aggressive anti-immigrant campaign.
Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, a Texas attorney representing two of the men in the van, said during a press conference on Friday his clients “reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger”. The men’s claims were first reported by the Washington Post.
The latest revelation comes as family members, local officials, lawmakers and civil rights groups desperately attempt to learn more about Salgado’s death. Further confirmation may be hard to access: the ICE officers involved in the incident were not wearing body cameras and their cars did not have dash-cams, the Texas representative Sylvia Garcia said on Friday at the press conference after speaking with ICE’s acting director, David Venturella.
Democrats have repeatedly called for ICE and other homeland security officials to wear body cameras when conducting arrest operations, after the shooting deaths of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of immigration officials in Minneapolis during the Trump administration’s surge there in January.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repeatedly claimed that Salgado “weaponized” his vehicle and attempted to hit an ICE officer, leading the officer to discharge his weapon. The claims this week echoed similar statements by DHS officials, which have been previously used to justify other ICE-related shootings. Videos of other shootings have called into question the veracity of DHS statements.
“Dangerous criminals – whether they be illegal aliens or US citizens – are assaulting law enforcement and turning their vehicles into weapons to attack law enforcement,” a DHS spokesperson said this week. Salgado, who has lived in the US for nearly ۳۵ years, did not have any criminal history.
The Harris county district attorney’s office launched an investigation into the shooting this week, the district attorney, Sean Teare, said, adding that his agency was “not invited to the scene” but that he hoped the DHS inspector general’s office, which is looking into the shooting, will share information with his department. The FBI is investigating whether Salgado assaulted ICE officials. The FBI earlier this year refused to share information with local Minnesota officials into three separate shootings, including Good’s and Pretti’s.
Salgado’s family and lawmakers demanded an independent investigation earlier this week, pointing to previous false and contradictory information presented by the DHS.
“We will go to the ends of the earth to collect all the evidence so we can eventually let the public know what happened,” Teare said.
Salgado’s family said during a press conference this week that Tuesday began for their father like any other day: he woke up early, got in his van and drove to pick up three other co-workers – one of them his brother – to head to a construction site.
But as they drove towards the site, two unmarked ICE vehicles began following the four men. According to reporting by the New York Times and Representative Garcia, Salgado and his brother were not supposed to be ICE’s arrest targets, but rather someone that ICE believed was in the van Salgado was driving.
It is unclear what happened next when ICE officials attempted to stop the van, since there has been no public video of the actual shooting. The Guardian contacted a grocery store in the area with security cameras that probably captured footage of the incident. A store employee said in Spanish that the company’s corporate office had not given permission to share footage with the press and that they had already turned footage over to investigators. (It is unclear whether they gave the footage to DHS agents or Harris county officials.)
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The DHS said in a statement that Salgado “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense”.
According to a written statement by one of the men, reviewed by the Washington Post, “there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”
Garcia said on Friday that there was now “conflicting testimony”, adding that there appeared to be no damage to the vehicles present at the site of the shooting.
Video shared on social media shows Salgado on the ground, with two ICE officials over him, while he bleeds out and yells. Salgado was taken to the hospital, where he died. His family learned of his death through social media posts, his son said.
Three men, who can be seen cuffed and on the ground in the bystander footage moments after the shooting, are now being detained at the Montgomery processing center, a privately run ICE facility in Conroe, Texas. The men are reportedly being pressured to sign self-removal orders to be deported from the US.
“Given the magnitude of this case and the implications that it carries, my clients may be pressured into signing documentation for their voluntary departure,” said Balderas-Ibarra, the attorney. “It is extremely important that we preserve the integrity of this investigation – that will all be out the window if they are deported”
The DHS has fallen under repeated scrutiny by public officials and communities nationwide, due to the aggressive arrest, detention and deportation tactics used to fulfill the Trump administration’s “mass deportations” campaign. There have been at least ۱۰ fatal shootings by federal immigration officials since January ۲۰۲۵.
