Lorenzo Salgado Jr. (left) and Ronaldo Salgado (right), sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, hold a news conference in Houston on Wednesday to demand an independent investigation into their father's killing. Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone; since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least 10 people.
Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, the Department of Homeland Security is using a familiar playbook: Officials are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”
Salgado’s son Ronaldo Salgado held a press conference Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into his father’s death. “I want to tell you about my dad,” he said. “He was a hardworking family man. He was also a man of routine.” Every day, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and drove to work on a construction site, just as he had done for 35 years.
“At 6:45 a.m., he should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses,” Ronaldo Salgado said. By 6:55, his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.
In a statement, DHS said Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed US citizen Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis in January.
DHS at the time alleged that Good, too, had “weaponized her vehicle.” Independent investigators disputed that characterization, but the officer who killed Good was never indicted. Before Good, there were Carlitos Ricardo Parias and Marimar Martinez. Both were shot at by federal agents in 2025 and were accused of trying to ram those agents with their vehicles. Both survived. Ruben Ray Martinez, who was shot by an ICE agent in March 2025, was killed. The agent who shot him in the heart said Martinez was using his car as a weapon.
It’s a narrative that law enforcement agencies frequently employ to justify fatally shooting unarmed motorists. A New York Times investigation found that US police officers killed over 400 unarmed drivers between 2015 and 2021. In many of those cases, the officers involved said they fired because the vehicle itself was a weapon.
The data shows that ICE is no exception. In 2024, journalist Lila Hassan identified 18 ICE shootings that involved a moving vehicle between 2015 and 2021. Over that same time period, public records show ICE agents shooting at least 59 people total and killing at least 23. Not a single indictment resulted from those incidents. Since that study, ICE’s budget has ballooned by tens of billions of dollars and its internal oversight offices have been gutted. The killings haven’t stopped.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “did not deserve to die,” Ronaldo Salgado said Wednesday. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” Ronaldo Salgado learned of his father’s passing, he said, from a video on social media. He recognized him immediately: “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”
