After a federal agent killed an undocumented Mexican man in his van during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, the government rushed to follow a familiar template. Just as it has after other shootings, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement insisting that the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, had “weaponized his vehicle” against the officer, who then justifiably opened fire. DHS offered no evidence of this.
But it appears three other people were in the van with the now-deceased man, and they presumably could recount their version of what happened: the victim’s brother and two employees of the dead man’s construction business. They were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the encounter, and we haven’t heard from them publicly about what happened.
Now, in another potentially dark turn in the saga, those three men are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proano, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, claimed in an interview with The New Republic.
Proano—who regularly confers with the family members of the victim and the three detainees and organized a press conference on their behalf earlier this week—said the family members were able to reach the three detainees, who then related this situation.
“They’re being pressured to sign self-deportation orders,” Proano told me. “They’re currently in detention. These men hold the key to what actually happened.” Under self-deportation, detained migrants agree to leave the country voluntarily within a prescribed time period.
According to DHS, officers tried to stop Araujo’s vehicle as part of a targeted operation, after which the undocumented Araujo “attempted to evade arrest.” DHS claimed Araujo “refused to follow multiple verbal commands” before trying to “run over” an ICE officer, who then fired “in self-defense.” Araujo, struck in the abdomen, was transported to the hospital, where he died.
Yet Araujo, 52, had been in the United States for 35 years, raised a family, and didn’t immediately seem prone to attempting vehicular manslaughter of federal law enforcement. A business owner himself, he and his passengers were driving to a job: The encounter occurred at the early hour of 6:50 a.m. ICE reportedly hasn’t presented evidence of its version of events and didn’t provide any video camera footage.
But other video of the encounter, reported on by NBC News—which doesn’t include the shooting itself—shows several other men lying face down on the ground along with Araujo, who is lying wounded with two officers crouched over him and one radioing for help.
The three men are Araujo’s brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two workers, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, Proano told TNR. Family members who are in touch with them confirmed the pressure to sign self-deportation orders, Proano says, adding that some of the men may be inclined to do so to avoid longer-term detention.
“We want full public disclosure of the eyewitness accounts of what actually happened on the day that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed,” Proano said. The pressure to self-deport, Proano added, looks like “an effort by DHS to get rid of the only eyewitnesses to what happened.” TNR emailed questions about this to DHS, which weren’t immediately answered.
There are other reasons to doubt that Araujo would attempt to kill an officer. NBC reports that DHS hasn’t said that the man has a previous criminal record. And Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, says that the family had actually been preparing for the possibility that he might be picked up by law enforcement, given increased ICE activity in Texas. The family had a plan, according to The Washington Post: He would comply if arrested, refrain from signing anything, and wait for the family to try to get him released.
A family man, Araujo also helped send his three U.S. citizen sons to college, as The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo reports. He was far along in the process of applying for legal protections, having even submitted fingerprints. And while Salgado, the victim’s son, is calling for a full investigation, the FBI’s local office is said to be focused mainly on establishing that an assault on a federal officer took place (the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is also probing the event).
A big question now, says Radley Balko, a criminal justice reform expert who writes about ICE abuses on his Substack, is whether these men are advised by lawyers to speak out about what they saw. (Proano told TNR he doesn’t believe they have legal representation yet.)
“You don’t pressure witnesses to a shooting to self-deport if your goal is to get to the bottom of what happened,” Balko said. “You pressure them to self-deport when you want to make sure that nobody learns what actually happened.”
Balko pointed out that with previous ICE shootings, the government has taken unabashedly heavy-handed steps either to suppress the truth of what happened or to rewrite it to cast the victims as instigators of violent confrontation.
For instance, a number of federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in protest over a Justice Department push to criminally investigate the actions of shooting victim Renee Good, and over DOJ’s refusal to include state officials in probing the shooting itself. And Balko notes that in a different ICE shooting in Minneapolis, a migrant eyewitness was flown to a detention center hundreds of miles away, potentially to prevent him fom testifying.
“There is precedent for this,” Balko said of ICE’s apparent response to the Texas shooting.
All this comes as ICE is embarked on a massive new escalation of deportations nationwide. Yet in this case, ICE is very eager to keep the removal operations out of the news. The last thing Republicans want with the midterms approaching is another big backlash akin to what met ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis.
Yet as we’ve seen again and again, ramping up this level of paramilitary force—and unleashing it to violently extract longtime residents and business owners from deep within local communities—of necessity creates the tinderbox conditions that make deadly shootings a matter of when, not if. The authors of these conditions are Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
In Texas, this has now resulted in an unspeakable tragedy. What remains to be seen is whether we’ll ever learn the full, horrifying story.
