Houston leaders on Wednesday said they have received little information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the fatal shooting of an immigrant Tuesday, while his eldest son publicly praised his father and demanded an investigation.
“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo Salgado, who works as a teacher, said of his father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during a press conference.
Recommended Videos
Salgado said his father was a “man of routine” who always began his day before sunrise and left the house around 6 a.m. to his job building homes in North Houston.
But on Tuesday, after picking up three other men, including his brother, for work, Salgado Araujo’s vehicle was stopped by agents in unmarked vehicles. The Department of Homeland Security said federal agents were attempting to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of an unspecified “targeted enforcement operation” in Houston’s East End, a predominantly Latino neighborhood.
The agency said Salgado Araujo also ignored verbal commands and tried to run over the ICE agent who shot him. The officer fired in self-defense, the statement said.
Salgado said his father, a Mexican citizen who was in the process of getting a work permit, may have feared that he was about to get robbed.
“One of his worst fears is that someone took away his work tools, because that is how he made his livelihood,” he said.
“Had my father seen an emblem of ICE, or an emblem that says anything about law enforcement agency, my father would have complied,” he added. “He would have not run away, because he feared for his life.”
Local elected leaders echoed demands for an independent investigation into Salgado Araujo’s death.
“What we know is very thin,” said Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “We want a full and transparent investigation. Every piece of evidence, body camera footage, dash cam footage, bystander video, dispatch records must all be preserved and released to an independent investigator and to the public.”
LULAC is offering a $5,000 reward for information and videos leading to “the arrest, indictment, conviction, or exoneration of any person involved in this potential murder.”
Domingo Garcia, LULAC’s national president, asked the Houston Police Department to investigate, saying he does not trust a federal investigation.
“We don’t expect the truth from the Department of Justice or from the FBI,” Garcia said. “We expect a whitewash, that’s just what we expect. But let me just be very clear, the only way we hold them accountable is if the citizens and the residents of Houston hold them accountable.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety said in a Wednesday statement that it was not involved in the incident and referred questions to ICE. DPS didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether it would initiate its own investigation.
Last year, the department investigated an ICE officer’s fatal shooting of 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island; the federal agency accused the San Antonio resident of intentionally trying to run over an agent as ICE helped direct traffic around an accident. Body camera and security footage, later released by DPS, didn’t definitively show Martinez attempting to do so.
Ronaldo Salgado said he learned about his father’s death through a social media video an hour after the shooting — not from law enforcement.
“I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot,” he said, through tears. “I recognized him immediately, not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.”
Salgado said his father was pronounced dead at the same hospital where he and his two brothers were born, Harris Health Ben Taub Hospital.
For most of the 35 years his father lived in Houston, Salgado said, “you can find him every evening after work, resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog. That’s how I want the world to know my father, not as someone who got shot and killed, but as a family man, a man who understands that good things come to those who put in hard work,” he said through tears.
Harris County Commissioner Lesley Briones, whose family immigrated from Mexico, said her “heart breaks for Lorenzo’s family, who will never have him home again. He literally built people’s American dream for decades, and his was ripped away. We must have the truth, we must have answers, and we must have accountability.”
In Austin Wednesday, a group of civil rights organizations and faith leaders denounced what they called a “killing” and urged elected officials to take action against ICE violence in their communities.
“This killing is the direct result of the militarization of our communities,” Mario Gaona with the Party for Socialism and Liberation said at a press conference downtown. “The terror and corruption have to stop. $30 billion in taxpayer money this year has been funneled into this deportation machine.”
Federal agents’ presence does not make cities safer, Gaona added. “It causes fear where there should be stability, fractures families, and erodes the trust people need to live and work in peace.”
Alex Nguyen and Alejandro Santos Cid contributed to this story.
Disclosure: Domingo Garcia has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.