Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52 years old, had lived in the USA for about 35 years, and built houses in Houston. On Tuesday morning, a little before 7 a.m., he was driving a white van through Magnolia Park on the city's east side, picking up the last of his crew before a job in the north of the city. His brother was with him, along with two of his workers. Officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency conducting the Trump regime's mass deportation programme, stopped the van on Canal Street. One of them shot him once in the right side of his abdomen. He died at Ben Taub Hospital. On Thursday the Harris County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide.
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Within hours of the shooting, before any investigator had spoken to any witness, the Department of Homeland Security told the public what had happened. Salgado Araujo had tried to escape, rammed an ICE vehicle, ignored repeated commands, and "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer", who fired in self-defence. That account went out on the wire services and led the broadcasts. It is still, three days later, unsupported by a single piece of evidence the department has been willing to show anyone.
It is also, piece by piece, coming apart, and it is coming apart in a way that will be familiar to anyone who followed what happened in Minneapolis this past January.
Salgado Araujo was not the target of the stop. ICE's acting director, David Venturella, told the local congresswoman, Sylvia Garcia, by phone on Thursday that the man the agency was hunting was somebody else.
Garcia's office says the warrant was for one of the other men in the van: "Another passenger had an administrative warrant and was the target." The New York Times, citing DHS, reports the warrants were for two Guatemalan men who were not in the van at all. The family says the four men in that van were Mexican. Both stories cannot be true, and neither is the account the department gave the public on Tuesday, immediately throwing doubt onto the official account.
Were you there? Tell us.
There is no body-camera footage of this killing and no dash-camera footage. What happened on Canal Street exists only in the memories of the people who were there and on the cameras above their doors. If you were near the 6800 block of Canal Street between about 6:15 and 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday 7 July, we would like to hear from you. We would also like to hear from anyone detained in the operation, from relatives and lawyers of the three men held in Conroe, and from current or former ICE and DHS staff who know how this operation was authorised and briefed.
If you have footage: do not crop, trim, filter or re-encode it, because the hidden data in the original file is often what makes it usable as evidence. Many doorbell and shop systems delete recordings within days, so export the original now and keep copies in two places. You are not obliged to hand original files or devices to federal agents without a warrant or a subpoena, and you should speak to a lawyer before you do.
Sending us something does not stop you sending it to anyone else. The Harris County District Attorney is asking witnesses to come forward. LULAC is offering a $5,000 reward for information and footage. Send it to all of us.
