HOUSTON — Lorenzo Salgado Araujo left his home in an unscathed white van early July 7 to pick up his brother and two other men for work building a house in the city’s northern suburbs.
At 6:46 a.m., according to neighborhood video footage, a dark grey Jeep Grand Cherokee and a black Nissan Pathfinder closely trailed him without emergency lights or sirens in Magnolia Park, one of Houston’s oldest Latino neighborhoods that remains mostly low-income and where residents say criminal activity is common.
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Salgado Araujo sharply turned left onto a roadway under construction. The Jeep follows, appearing to speed up behind Salgado Araujo and catching up to his left side in the narrow street, according to the footage. The Nissan, which apparently missed the turn, cut through a business parking lot to catch up.
Not using emergency lights and sirens was the first red flag of many in the fatal incident, according to 14 attorneys, former government officials and law enforcement officers who reviewed available footage of the pursuit at the request of The Texas Tribune.
“It’s incredibly professionally irresponsible for officers to be attempting to do either of those things — stop a car or engage in some kind of pursuit — without any emergency lights,” said Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina professor who focuses on use of force and is a former police officer.
The footage in this case, he added, “looks more like a carjacking attempt than it does a police stop.”
The Department of Homeland Security said last week that federal immigration agents killed Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Houston construction worker, father of three, and grandfather of one. The agency describes the shooting as self defense, saying Salgado Araujo was shot because he was trying to “run over” an ICE agent. The ICE agents were not wearing body cameras and dash cam footage was not available, federal agents told Houston congressional Democrats.
The Texas Tribune, however, pieced together videos of the incident provided by neighborhood security footage and accounts shared on social media. The available footage, which largely does not contain audio, spans less than two minutes in total and lacks crucial moments. For example, it does not capture the shooting or when the vehicles apparently collided. (Footage after the shooting shows the white van had significant damage on the driver’s side.)
But details of the chase shown in the video footage and described by witnesses — including the unmarked ICE cars, the aggressive driving tactics and the fatal shot through a passenger door — all seem to violate longstanding best practices, and possibly even the law, according to attorneys and former police who reviewed the footage.
“Is there a lot of smoke around here to suggest that something terribly wrong and unconstitutional happened?” said Jeff Edwards, an Austin attorney who recently won a significant U.S. Supreme Court case regarding a fatal Amarillo police shooting of a Black teen during a traffic stop. “Oh my gosh, yes.”
Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had been in Houston for nearly 35 years, had no criminal record or prior deportation order, according to officials and available public records. His family said that he was in the final stages of obtaining a legal status through his children who are U.S. citizens, a process which can take years.
The fatal shooting has roiled the city and the country. It is among a growing number of deadly incidents at the hands of ICE agents during vehicle stops since President Donald Trump returned to office. On Monday, ICE agents shot and killed a Colombian man in Maine and, as in the Houston shooting and others, claimed that the 25-year-old had “weaponized” his vehicle, forcing agents to defend themselves. On Tuesday, a 28-year-old Mexican man died in Florida after an apparent traffic accident following his fleeing from ICE.
That same day, multiple news organizations, citing anonymous sources, reported that the agency was suspending all vehicle stops. But in an early Wednesday post on Truth Social, Trump said that he did not want that policy to end.
“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP,” he said. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”
A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to requests for comment, referring questions to the DHS, which oversees ICE. DHS did not respond to detailed questions regarding that alleged change, the Houston incident or the agency’s use of force policies.
The concerns about ICE vehicle stops have escalated since the fatal shooting of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, who immigrant agents killed after she was leaving a Minneapolis protest in her car earlier this year. Video footage disputed DHS’s accounts of her case and state prosecutors continue to attempt to bring charges against federal agents.
The first known ICE killing during Trump’s second administration occurred in Texas in March 2025, although it wasn’t made public until earlier this year after a federal public records lawsuit. In that instance, 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez was in South Padre Island when ICE agents fatally shot him during a traffic stop in which they also accused him of having “weaponized” his car.
In Houston, Mayor John Whitmire, after days of protests, requested that Texas Department of Public Safety officials launch an independent probe. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare vowed to bring “every available resource” to investigating the shooting. Gov. Greg Abbott, who for days has remained silent about the ICE death even as national politicians weighed in, said Wednesday in his first known comments about the killing that DPS’ Texas Rangers would investigate and that “stopping illegal immigration from coming across our border can be achieved without shooting people.”
“It appears from everything we’ve seen that either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars,” Teare told CBS News.
DHS’s Office of Inspector General and the FBI are also investigating the incident, as is routine for deaths involving federal agents.
Unmarked cars
In the Houston case, experts in particular took issue with the use of two unmarked cars that pursued and surrounded Salgado Araujo, which is visible in video footage and was confirmed by attorneys representing the witnesses.
Salgado Araujo’s sons, in a press conference and separate interview with the Tribune on the day after the shooting, said that their father would not have fled or fought back if he had known it was ICE officers trying to stop him. Salgado Araujo had talked at length with his family and his attorneys about what to do if police or ICE stopped him.
“Had my father seen an emblem of ICE, or an emblem that says anything about law enforcement agency, my father would have complied,” said Ronaldo Salgado, a 29-year-old Houston ISD teacher. “He would have not run away because he feared for his life.”
Many law enforcement agencies restrict officers in unmarked vehicles from making traffic stops. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office, for example, states in its policy that if a deputy in an unmarked car has “probable cause to believe a criminal offense has taken place and that offense warrants immediate action,” the deputy may follow “safely” until a police vehicle with lights and sirens “enters into pursuit.” Without such lights and sirens, officers “are not exempt from adhering to traffic laws,” the policy cautions.
Scott Shuchart, who served from 2010 to 2018 as the senior adviser to DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates that agency’s abuses, told the Tribune that he believed a 2023 memo issued by former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas under then-President Joe Biden remained largely intact. That policy stated, “DHS officers should avoid standing in front of or behind a vehicle.” They also should “avoid intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.”
Clearly identifying as law enforcement when making traffic stops is important not only for the suspect being chased, but the safety of officers and the public, said Stoughton, the South Carolina professor.
“Most police today have policies that suggest or policies that state that in most circumstances, marked cars should be the ones initiating traffic stops,” he said, adding that when unmarked vehicles must make such a stop, they should use emergency lights and sirens so that they can signal not only to the suspect that this is law enforcement but also so that people in the area know to get out of the way.
One of the passengers told the Washington Post that as Salgado Araujo turned, some police lights were activated, although that is not visible in the available footage.
Data shows that ICE arrests have drastically increased in Texas, even as the referrals from local jails, typically the main driver of detentions to the federal agency, have plummeted. As a result, accounts of ICE agents — often masked, in unmarked vehicles, and allegedly using more dangerous tactics — have escalated. Many people have told reporters that they never knew it was ICE agents attempting to detain them.
“If I’m driving down the street in a van, and all of a sudden two unmarked vehicles are chasing me down the road, I’m not going to stop,” said Jules Johnson, former head of the Harris County District Attorney’s civil rights division who reviewed the Houston footage and has previously prosecuted fatal shooting cases involving federal agents. “And I’m a Texan, so if you pull up next to me, I’m probably going to start shooting, right? Because who are you? Why are you here? Why are you chasing me down the street at seven o’clock in the morning?”
Aggressive driving
Experts also took issue with the aggressive driving tactics displayed in the available footage, that at one point appeared to show the two ICE vehicles attempting to cut off the white van on a narrow, residential street.
Footage shows the unmarked Jeep appearing to speed up to the left side of Salgado Araujo’s van.
Seconds later, in footage partially obscured by trees, the Jeep is seen on the right of the van as both vehicles near the closest intersection.
The Jeep then veers left, appearing to cut off the van and forcing it onto the unpaved lane under construction, in what experts called an attempt to box it in. In an obstructed view through trees, the van seems to make a three-point turn, doubling back from the direction in which it came.
Gil Kerlikowske, a former Seattle police chief and commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President Barack Obama, said that boxing in a vehicle is a complicated tactic that usually should be reserved for instances when suspects are wanted on serious offenses.
“If you box someone in, it’s called a felony stop, and that’s because you know you’ve already got this probable cause that this person is involved in a felony,” Kerlikowske said. “So it’s very different than when you turn on your lights and the person pulls over, or if the person doesn’t pull over, they may attempt to flee.”
In the latter scenarios, “you don’t do any of the boxing in. You don’t get out of the vehicle,” he added.
The pursuit itself, occurring early on a weekday in a residential neighborhood, was incredibly dangerous, Stouton said.
About 300 deaths each year happen because of police pursuits, he said. About a third of those are “completely innocent bystanders who are killed in the course of a pursuit, either struck by the subject’s vehicle or struck by a police vehicle.”
“Most of the time, officers should only pursue when there’s a good reason to pursue,” Stoughton said, adding that the threshold would typically include a violent criminal or someone who poses a threat to the public.
“The idea that it is worth the danger of a pursuit, especially the increased danger that comes from pursuing in unmarked vehicles that don’t have lights and sirens, that’s just unfathomable,” Stoughton added. “That is professionally incompetent.”
After the pursuit, video footage shows new damage to the white van that wasn’t visible earlier in the day.
On the driver’s side there is a dent on the front corner and a long scrape along the body of the van, according to footage. ICE officials said the van rammed the ICE agents, but lawyers for three of the witnesses said that never happened.
Edwards, the Austin attorney who reviewed the footage and photographs of the van’s markings, said that such damage suggests it was ICE agents who at one point hit the van.
“It would seem to be very difficult for the white van’s movement to be the sole cause of that kind of damage,” he said.
The shooting
It’s unclear from the video footage when ICE agents first started firing at Salgado Araujo, though lawyers for the three witnesses said ICE agents shot through the front passenger window.
Footage shows that after the van turned around on the street it slowly moved away from the ICE agents in an unpaved lane under construction. At least three people, likely the ICE agents, are seen running after the van.
By this point, the driver’s side paneling of the van is dented.
Experts said the placement of the fatal bullet wound suggests agents likely fired while on foot, which echoes the written accounts of the three passengers.
“From what I can see on those videos and and from what we know about police training and best practices and the law regarding when it is reasonable for officers to use deadly force, it does not seem to me like this is going to be justifiable,” said John Gross, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on police practices regarding use of force.
Decades of policing training have instructed officers not to shoot at a moving vehicle if they can instead remove themselves from harm, experts said. The reasoning has been that the safety of officers, and the public, is better preserved by allowing fleeing vehicles to escape because a wounded driver is often more dangerous than a fleeing one.
In a 1985 U.S. Supreme Court case, justices found that officers can use deadly force only in instances of “imminent harm.” Four years later, the nation’s highest court agreed that when evaluating such cases, the totality of circumstances should be taken into account.
For that reason, experts said, it is important to know what DHS officers knew about their supposed targets before they attempted the stop and whether they were accused of dangerous crimes.
DHS spokespeople have not responded to such questions and congressional Democrats are attempting to answer them.
“If they think that these people are wanted for murder, and that they’re willing to do X, Y, and Z, that certainly places it in a knowledge base that would be different from if we’re just trying to stop some illegal aliens,” said Patrick O’Burke, a law enforcement consultant and former Texas state police commander, who reviewed the footage and called the entirety of the stop “troubling.”
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat, and her staff asked DHS to confirm what led to the stop. The acting ICE director, Dave Venturella, told her that his agency had an administrative warrant, a final order of removal, for someone believed to have entered the van. When pressed, congressional staff said, the director could not confirm which occupant was the target. He said officers had conducted surveillance and believed that the wanted person entered the van, according to Garcia’s staff.
However, unnamed ICE officials said that the original target was at least one Guatemalan man with a prior deportation order.
Everyone in Salgado Araujo’s van was of Mexican descent.
Kayla Guo, Alex Nguyen, Uriel J. Garcia, Gabby Birenbaum, Colleen DeGuzman, Ayden Runnels and Stephen Simpson contributed to this report.