The Harris County District Attorney said Thursday that its investigation into the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston last month by immigration agents will cost an estimated $2.52 million over three years.
“We don’t know when this litigation or investigation is going to end,” District Attorney Sean Teare said. “We are not going into this with preconceived notions of whether or not a charge is going to be filed. But this community and this country deserve a full, transparent investigation wherever the evidence takes us.”
Teare was joined at a Thursday press conference by County Judge Lina Hidalgo and County Commissioners Rodney Ellis and Lesley Briones. The commissioners’ court unanimously approved the funds later in the day.
The money will go into a designated fund for the investigation and will be used to address needs such as hiring an additional prosecutor and investigator, paying for overtime and technology upgrades.
Teare said the case is moving quickly, thanks in part to evidence and tips from Houstonians. Still, some key questions can’t be answered unless federal agencies share their evidence, Teare said, adding that he’s willing to file a lawsuit if necessary to compel them to do so.
“We will follow every avenue necessary to get a complete picture of what happened. If that’s going into federal court in Washington, D.C and suing people, then that is what we are going to do,” Teare said.
The district attorney’s office decided to investigate the July 7 shooting after federal agencies refused to give local officials the names of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents present when the 52-year-old construction worker died of a gunshot wound after agents driving unmarked vehicles stopped his van.
Other than patchy videos from local businesses along the streets where Salgado Araujo died, there’s no footage from the ICE agents’ point of view because they were not wearing body cameras.
“I think it’s very difficult for a lot of people to have the confidence in our federal justice department that they once had,” Ellis said.
A city METRO bus with a video camera onboard passed the scene around the time of the shooting. Teare said the office is aware of the video, but his office isn’t releasing any information about what it shows because he doesn’t want to taint a potential jury pool.
An ICE spokesperson said agents opened fire because Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”
But the three men who were in the van with Salgado Araujo — two of whom remain in a Conroe immigration detention center — dispute ICE’s account. The men said Salgado Araujo never attempted to hit an agent with his van, according to written accounts relayed by their lawyers.
ICE agents were not targeting Salgado Araujo the morning he was killed and were instead looking for a different immigrant, U.S. Rep. Sylvia R. Garcia, D-Houston, said after speaking to the agency’s acting director. ICE has yet to publicly identify that man.
Teare called on the federal government to release the two witnesses still in detention.
“We need the absolute truth in this case, and the best way to do that is to interview the three eyewitnesses when the government is not detaining them,” he said.
Hidalgo said she hopes the ICE agents come forward to explain what happened and give the family and the city of Houston some amount of closure.
“This is not going to go away,” she said.
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