There Will be An Investigation by Houston ofHow Ice Kill A Mexican Immigrant
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| The site where a federal immigration officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times |
Pooja Salhotra and Orlando MayorquĂn
Orlando MayorquĂn reported from Houston.
New York Times
The agency said Lorenzo Salgado Araujo tried to ram [?] agents with a van before one shot him dead. A lawyer for his passengers said that was untrue.
Hours after three witnesses questioned the official account of how an immigration agent killed a man in Houston this week, city officials said they would begin their own investigation of the federal government’s actions.
Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said he, the city’s police department and the district attorney’s office would work aggressively to obtain all evidence and uncover the truth, reversing his earlier position that the city had no jurisdiction over the case.
“We are not settling to wait for an F.B.I. report,” Mr. Whitmire said during a news briefing on Friday afternoon. “We want answers.”
The episode began about 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant, was driving in East Houston on his way to work at a construction site in a van with three other workers. Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement began tailing him.
On Friday, the agency said in a statement that Mr. Araujo had rammed an ICE vehicle, had not followed orders and had tried to run over an officer. An ICE agent fired in self-defense, the statement said. Mr. Araujo was shot in the abdomen and taken to a hospital, where he died.
No evidence was provided to support ICE’s account.
On Friday, the three men with Mr. Araujo said through a lawyer that he had not used his vehicle as a weapon or tried to run over the immigration officers. The men were arrested and provided their version of events to the lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who visited them in immigration detention.
“I have no doubt that what they are saying is the truth,” Mr. Balderas-Ibarra said during a news conference on Friday. “All three reiterated that at no point was an agent standing in front of the vehicle nor was an agent placed in the line of danger.”
Mr. Araujo’s death came as ICE officers are increasing arrests across the United States, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. In five days at the end of June, agents arrested more than 10,000 people, the documents show. From Tuesday through Thursday, ICE officers arrested more than 6,000 people, internal records show.
Previous surges have been accompanied by violence, and video evidence in recent months has disproved federal law enforcement’s accounts of several shootings.
In Houston, no video has emerged of the moment when Mr. Araujo was shot. Surveillance and witness videos obtained by The Times show two unmarked ICE vehicles tailing the white van and trying to cut it off. The van does a U-turn before stopping alongside the road, with several immigration agents running toward the vehicle as it comes to a halt.
A video filmed shortly after the shooting shows agents hovering over a man bleeding and holding his abdomen. More images show another man on the ground, his hands behind his back.
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The ICE agents were not wearing body cameras and none of the vehicles had dashboard cameras, according to Sylvia Garcia, the area’s congresswoman. Ms. Garcia, a Democrat, said she had spoken with David Venturella, the acting director of ICE.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office is leading an investigation into the shooting, according to the agency’s statement, which also said that the F.B.I.’s Houston office is also looking into the case — as a potential assault on a federal officer.
Mr. Araujo’s family and community members this week demanded an independent investigation.
Initially, Mayor Whitmire, a Democrat, questioned whether the city had that authority. But after the detained witnesses disputed the official account, he said on Friday that the city would act. He told reporters he had contacted the Harris County district attorney’s office.
Both the district attorney and the mayor said that federal law enforcement agencies were not cooperating with local officials and were tightly controlling evidence. Still, Mayor Whitmire said the city “would not rest” until it had completed its inquiry.
The Trump administration has fought local scrutiny of its actions.
Its stance in Houston appears similar to the one it took in Minneapolis, where two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were fatally shot by federal immigration agents in January during an enforcement surge.
In the case of Ms. Good, a Minnesota agency that investigates police shootings tried to team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the killing was justified. But senior federal officials ordered the F.B.I. to halt the investigation. They instead suggested that prosecutors examine whether Ms. Good had assaulted the ICE agent.
Minnesota law enforcement officials have sued the federal government to obtain evidence related to the two shootings, along with a third that was not fatal.
The Houston police chief said Friday that he will meet with the head of the F.B.I. Houston field office on Tuesday to discuss the evidence. Sean Teare, the Harris County district attorney, said he was prepared to take legal action to get it.
“If it involves lawsuits in the federal courts, rest assured I have people who will do that,” he said.
The ICE agents who stopped Mr. Araujo had been searching for a different undocumented immigrant. A husband, father of three children and a business owner, Mr. Araujo had lived in the United States without authorization for 35 years. According to his sons, he was in the process of obtaining a work permit.
“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” his son Ronaldo Salgado said this week.
Mr. Araujo’s body, which has been in federal custody, was to be taken on Friday to a funeral home where the family would be able to collect it, according to the League of United Latin American Citizens, a civil rights organization.
Ms. Garcia, the lawmaker, said she feared that ICE would try to deport the witnesses, who are detained in Conroe, about 40 miles north of Houston. She said that Mr. Venturella had assured her that the witnesses, all Mexican nationals, would not be moved.
Mr. Teare said that his investigators would be dogged.
“We will go to the ends of the earth to interview all relevant witnesses,” Mr. Teare said. “We will go to the ends of the earth to look at all evidence.”
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