A Mexican father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was fatally shot by an ICE agent as he drove to work in Houston on Tuesday.
The shooting happened in a predominantly Latino neighborhood when agents were trying to stop the vehicle the victim was driving to a construction site where he worked. According to the Department of Homeland Security , the agents were looking for someone else when they tried to stop Salgado Araujo. They claim that instead of stopping, the victim ran into an ICE vehicle and that an agent shot him in self-defense.
The victim’s family has said that he was close to obtaining legal status after having lived in the United States for nearly four decades. He was educated on what he should do if he ever encountered ICE agents and his son, Ronaldo, noted that his father may have been afraid that he was the target of a robbery because the ICE vehicle was unmarked.
The office of U.S. Rep Sylvia Garcia said that after speaking with the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, it was revealed that Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of the operation.
“Another passenger had an administrative warrant and was the target,” said Joseph Guzman, a spokesperson for Garcia’s office.
The New York Times reported that information obtained from the DHS revealed that none of the people in Salgado Araujo’s van were targets of any immigration operations. However, in a statement in Houston Public Media, a DHS spokesperson did not specify if any of the passengers were targets, but did say that one of them “resembled the target.”
“After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address,” the DHS spokesperson said. “Weeks prior to the incident, they noted two white vans at the property. On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop.”
Salgado Araujo’s death is another in a string of deaths precipitated by ICE operations or ICE detention. According to Human Rights Watch, between Trump’s inauguration in Jan. 2025 through June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody in the United States.
