The 52-year-old Houston man fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent earlier this week was not the target of the agency’s operation, said U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, who has called for release of any video footage capturing the deadly episode.
Garcia told The Texas Tribune that acting ICE Director David Venturella informed her in a call Thursday afternoon that ICE agents didn’t have any body-worn cameras or dashboard cameras during the shooting.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Thursday that it had received a tip from an unspecified law enforcement agency that led ICE agents to surveil a Houston residence and subsequently Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s van.
“After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address,” the DHS statement 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.”
Agents had an administrative warrant for someone other than Salgado Araujo or his brother, who was also in the van, Garcia said Venturella told her.
According to the New York Times, ICE agents had administrative warrants for two Guatemalan immigrants. According to Salgado Araujo’s sons, their father, uncle and two other men in the vehicle are from Mexico. An administrative warrant does not have the same legal power as a criminal warrant, which must be reviewed and signed by a judge.
According to ICE intake information, two of the three men are from Mexico and were being held at the Montgomery ICE Processing Center in Conroe as of Thursday afternoon.
Garcia said she got a commitment from Venturella that all officers in the field would have a body cam by the end of the month.
A DHS spokesperson confirmed that the officers involved in the shooting didn’t wear body-worn cameras, saying that they had not been issued that equipment and blamed Democrats for holding them up. After Congress recently provided “historic funding,” the spokesperson said they would be provided.
“Body cameras have been deployed to more than half the field offices with the remaining half to receive them in the next 60 days,” the department’s statement said.
According to a previous statement from an ICE spokesperson, federal agents attempted to stop Salgado Araujo’s van as part of a “targeted enforcement” operation. The statement said 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.”
DHS didn’t respond to additional questions from the Tribune asking if Salgado Araujo was the target or if it was someone in the van he was driving.
Salgado Araujo’s family has said the father of three, who has lived in the U.S. for more than three decades, was on his way to work with his brother and two other workers riding in the van early Tuesday morning when he was killed.
It’s unclear which law enforcement agency gave ICE the tip that led to the shooting. The Houston Police Department said Thursday that it had no involvement in the shooting of Salgado Araujo. A spokesperson for the department directed questions to Homeland Security.
The Texas Department of Public Safety didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Both Houston and state police have collaborated with ICE to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants during the Trump administration’s mass deportation push. The administration has asked local law enforcement nationally to assist ICE in finding and detaining undocumented immigrants.
The Harris County Sheriff’s Office, South Houston Police Department and Harris County Constable’s Precinct 6 did not immediately respond to questions about whether they communicated the tip to ICE.
The shooting has roiled the country, with Democratic leaders and advocates in Houston and across the country calling for an independent investigation. Many have said the Trump administration can’t be trusted to provide a full and accurate account of what happened, given that the federal government’s initial narratives of fatal shootings by immigration agents have been called into question after footage and other evidence came to light.
The FBI has said it is investigating DHS’s claim that the ICE agent was assaulted. And the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General is leading an investigation into the shooting. Neither agency has said whether these are criminal or administrative investigations.
Garcia added that ICE said it would respond to a demand letter the congresswoman issued Thursday with other Democratic lawmakers after DHS’s Office of Inspector General completed its investigation, but didn’t provide a timeline for that investigation.
The Harris County District Attorney’s office has also launched its own probe of the shooting.
Ayden Runnels, Colleen DeGuzman and Lomi Kriel contributed to this report.
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