GoKawiilAdvocates are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security release bodycam footage of the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who was killed by ICE officers in Houston during a traffic stop earlier this week. But DHS claims the agents involved in the shooting weren’t wearing body cameras because of the lengthy government shutdown that prevented ICE and Customs and Border Protection from receiving additional federal funding for 76 days — a shutdown that was itself spurred by congressional bickering over reforms to DHS after federal agents killed two civilians earlier this year.
Two competing narratives have emerged in the absence of any footage of the shooting, which occurred Tuesday around 7AM as Salgado Araujo, who owned a construction business, drove to a work site with three of his employees. But as the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti demonstrated, DHS will readily accuse victims of attacking agents — even when video evidence shows otherwise.
But what good is video footage or eyewitness accounts in a world where the government will just deny accountability, even when confronted with evidence that clearly contradicts their statements? Even if footage of Salgado Araujo’s shooting does emerge, it won’t stop DHS from saying whatever it wants about the people it kills.
An ICE spokesperson said Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer” — which echoes claims DHS has made after other shootings, some of them fatal. But three eyewitnesses, all of whom are in ICE detention, maintain that Salgado Araujo did no such thing. According to their accounts, which attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra shared with The Washington Post, ICE vehicles surrounded the work van on both sides and shot into their vehicle. Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told The New Republic that DHS is pressuring the witnesses to self-deport.
In a statement released after the shooting, DHS said agents stopped Salgado Araujo “as part of a targeted enforcement operation.” But sources with knowledge of the situation told both The New York Times and CNN that Salgado Araujo wasn’t the target. Officers were reportedly looking for two Guatemalan men. While surveilling a property connected to the Guatemalan men, officials had seen two white vans, a DHS spokesperson told the Times. Later, “they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target” — the van driven by Salgado Araujo.
ICE has reportedly increased its presence in Houston in recent weeks as part of a broader enforcement push, albeit a less bombastic one than DHS’s shock-and-awe raids in Minnesota. DHS changed tactics after widespread backlash to Operation Metro Surge, opting for “targeted” arrests over mass raids. But quieter enforcement doesn’t mean less enforcement. Earlier this month, ICE reported it had arrested 10,000 people in just five days.
This sharp rise in arrests may be fueled by rampant racial profiling. Federal agents are disproportionately targeting Latinos in the New York City area, according to hundreds of federal court records analyzed by The City Reporter. Though Latin Americans make up approximately 66 percent of the region’s undocumented population, more than 93 percent of people DHS agents grabbed off city streets were Latinos. Many of these followed the same pattern as the attempted arrest of Salgado Araujo in Houston. According to court records, agents would grab someone who they claimed looked like their intended target and detain them even if they weren’t the person they were looking for.
DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin, who took over the department after the ouster of Kristi Noem, reportedly wanted to present a softer image on immigration after facing widespread criticism over its tactics in Minnesota — especially in advance of the midterms.
If DHS was hoping that its less overtly aggressive approach would keep ICE out of the headlines, the shooting of Salgado Araujo has done the opposite. Hundreds of protesters gathered in Houston on Wednesday, marching to the block where Salgado Araujo was killed. Democrats are calling for an independent investigation of the shooting. DHS’s Office of the Inspector General has reportedly opened its own probe. The FBI’s Houston field office is also investigating the alleged assault on a federal law enforcement officer — even though eyewitnesses say no assault occurred.
In fact, the three witnesses claimed that ICE agents shot unprovoked. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, one of the men who was traveling with Salgado Araujo, said in a handwritten note reviewed by the Post, because “there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”
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