US ICE agent fatally shoots driver in Texas
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a driver in Houston as officers tried to stop the man’s car.
Tuesday’s death comes amid a growing federal crackdown on immigrants.
The man who was shot and killed was identified by ICE as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican citizen and “illegal alien” who attempted to evade arrest during a “targeted enforcement operation” by federal immigration officers.
Ronaldo Salgado, who identified himself as the son of the slain driver, told Spanish-language television station Telemundo Houston that his father was shot while looking for work in the area.
According to ICE’s description of the incident, Salgado “crashed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to comply with multiple verbal commands, and armed his vehicle with the intent to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”
ICE said the confrontation resulted in “our officer firing his weapon in self-defense” and that the driver, who was taken to the hospital for his injuries, died.
Reuters could not immediately confirm the man’s immigration status or the circumstances of the shooting.
Video footage recorded by a security camera at a nearby business and reviewed by Reuters showed a man lying on the ground next to a white van and surrounded by police officers, apparently following the shooting.
Houston Fire Department spokesman Rustin Rawlings said firefighters dispatched to the scene found a man who had been shot in the abdomen and was receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation before being taken to the hospital.
In many cases over the past year, immigration enforcement agencies’ initial accounts of the use of force have been disproved by video footage or other evidence.
In October, a Chicago-area woman named Marimar Martinez was accused of hitting law enforcement officers with her car.
He was shot five times but survived. Charges against him were eventually dropped, and video evidence suggested the agents may have crashed his car themselves.
Trump administration officials also said that Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens shot and killed by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis in January, threatened the agents with bodily harm before being killed, despite video evidence to the contrary.
In May, a Minnesota prosecutor charged an ICE agent with assaulting a Venezuelan man in a nonfatal shooting in Minneapolis during the same immigration crackdown in which Good and Pretti were killed.
ICE said Tuesday that the FBI will lead the investigation into the attack.
The deadly shooting in Houston comes amid a recent surge in the number of ICE arrests nationwide, with immigration officers rounding up nearly 2,000 immigrants a day last week, according to two people familiar with the matter.
