This past Tuesday, a man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was murdered by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Houston, Texas.

• Mr. Salgado Araujo was 52 years old. He had lived in Houston for 35 years. He was a husband. He had three children. He owned a construction business. He had no criminal record whatsoever.

• He had picked up three members of his construction crew and they were on their way to work when their van was targeted by unmarked vehicles. There is surveillance video of the unmarked vehicles driving aggressively and cutting the van off.

• An ICE agent shot Mr. Salgado Araujo in the abdomen. Bystander video shows Mr. Salgado Araujo on the ground, calling for help.

• ICE agents removed all identifying information from Mr. Salgado Araujo before he was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

• It has since been revealed that neither Mr. Salgado Araujo, nor any of the other men in the van, were the person the ICE agents were actually looking for. (Which is not to say that shooting him would have been OK if he had been who they were looking for.)

• ICE is claiming that Mr. Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over an agent, who fired “in self-defense.” That, of course, is exactly what the Trump regime claimed when one of its agents murdered Renee Good in broad daylight earlier this year in Minneapolis — a claim irrefutably disproved by video evidence.

• The three other men in the van — who were separated immediately after the shooting — have each independently stated that Mr. Salgado Araujo did not use his vehicle as a weapon, that he did not attempt to run over the agents, and that no agent had been positioned in front of the vehicle.

• Notably, the ICE agents were not wearing body cameras, and federal authorities have released precisely zero video footage related to the shooting.

Federal agents carrying out the Trump regime’s stupid and racist campaign of terror against immigrants have shot at least 21 people (that we know of) since Trump returned to power. Five of those people have died as a result of being shot my Trump’s “immigration enforcement” thugs: Ruben Ray Martinez (Texas, March 2025); Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez (Illinois, September 2025); Renee Good (Minnesota, January 2026); Alex Pretti (Minnesota, January 2026); Lorenzo Salgado Araujo (Texas, July 2026).

We simply cannot trust ICE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), or the FBI to adequately investigate this killing. In fact, in this case and others, federal authorities are actually impeding investigations by state and local law enforcement.

Mr. Salgado Araujo’s family is calling for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate his killing and for the Trump regime — including ICE, DHS, the FBI, and the Justice Department — to cooperate with investigations by local law enforcement.

Join Public Citizen in demanding a fair and impartial investigation into the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.

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For justice,

- Robert Weissman & Lisa Gilbert, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen


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