LOrenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old building contractor and father of three, he was “a regular guy,” according to his sons. He woke up at 5 a.m. every day, ate a big breakfast prepared by his wife, and left home at sunrise to build a house in the Houston area. Salgado Araujo crossed the border from Mexico as a teenager and has been working without legal status for 35 years. Yesterday he left in his work car to pick up his brother and two other men on their way to work. A team of ICE officers, traveling in two unmarked SUVs, were looking for one of the men. What exactly happened next is not clear.
When the officers tried to stop the vehicle, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Salgado Araujo ignored their commands and crashed into their vehicle. An officer drew his weapon and shot Salgado Araujo in the stomach. Video posted on social networks it showed A man face down in the street and moaning in pain, with his hands behind his back and two officers on him. Salgado Araujo died at a Houston hospital a few hours later.
DHS, in a brief statement, said that Salgado Araujo “crashed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to comply with multiple verbal commands, and rammed his vehicle in an attempt to overpower an ICE law enforcement officer causing our officer to fire his weapon in self-defense.”
The killing was the first killing of ICE officers since the death of Beautiful Renee in Minneapolis on January 7. (Another protester, Alex Pretti, was killed by border agents (two weeks later.) This time, Trump administration officials were not quick to blame the dead on acts of “domestic terrorism,” as they did following the Wema and Pretti shootings. They have announced an internal DHS investigation into the actions of the ICE officer, as well as an FBI investigation into whether Salgado Araujo carried out the attack before the shooting.
Senior ICE officials I spoke with said they had received limited information about what happened. The ICE officer who shot Salgado Araujo was a veteran with more than two decades of experience, a senior ICE official told me. DHS did not respond to questions about the officer’s identity.
Immigration advocates and Democratic officials in Houston said today that they do not believe DHS’s claims, and other groups are offering cash rewards for the video tape. “Remember Minneapolis? Remember Renee Good? Didn’t ICE learn anything from that experience?” asked Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents the congressional district of Houston, during a press conference today with the adult sons of Salgado Araujo.
White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and other administration officials leading President Trump. mass deportation campaign have emphasized in recent months that they have abandoned the kind of roving street patrols that caused a fight in Minneapolis. ICE teams have returned to the “targeted enforcement techniques” the agency has traditionally used, they say. It is a more deliberate approach where officers plan their operations in advance and try to keep suspects in custody as safely as possible.
What’s different about targeted operations now is that they often target people in cars, according to senior ICE officials I spoke with. Officers were relying more on a method they called “knock and talk,” where they would arrive at a suspect’s home and coax them to open the door. But word has spread—through legal clinics, advocacy organizations, and social media—that officers need a court warrant to force entry. Almost no one opens their door to ICE anymore.
That has left ICE officials scrambling to make more arrests by catching their targets leaving their homes or heading to work, usually in cars. Some large police departments have vehicle pursuit policies with guidelines for when lethal force is appropriate. Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, trains its agents using Emergency Operations Handbook. But ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Enforcement, the branch responsible for immigration arrests and deportations, has no handbook, let alone a vehicle tracking policy, relying instead on broad use-of-force guidelines. ICE officers receive less training in running traffic stops than most police officers, officials told me. One senior ICE official—who, like others, was not authorized to speak to the media—acknowledged it was a problem.
“Our operations are no longer in shelters. They are more open,” he told me. “Our methods and our training and our policies all had to be looked at because a lot of our activities were more controlled, in the shelter, and you had fewer issues to worry about.”
ICE street level Arrest operations have been handled by special teams. But the administration has been increasing the implementation of the campaign to impeach the president and sending more officers to the streets. Last week, there were an average of 2,000 arrests a day across the country, nearly double the rate this spring, ICE officials told me. Trump officials say they prioritize “the worst of the worst,” meaning those with a history of violent crime, but Homan said on Fox News Monday that only half of those detained have criminal records. “ICE has broken historical records every day,” he said. “We’re going to add more resources, and we’re going to add more targeting. We have millions of people we need to reach.”
After a hiring spree last fall, ICE has doubled its number of deportation officers, but they receive little training at the traffic stops, two officials told me. They operate in civilian clothes and drive unmarked vehicles, and are authorized to shoot to kill if they think a suspect is driving in a manner that poses a threat.
There have been at least 16 shootings involving vehicles, four of them fatal, since Trump returned to office, according to records. In March 2025, an ICE officer killed 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez, a US citizen, while driving erratically through a nighttime checkpoint on South Padre Island, in Texas. Last September, when Trump sent border agents to Chicago, an ICE officer shot and killed a 38-year-old chef and father of two from Mexico, Silverio Villegas González, who tried to drive off during a traffic stop, dragging the officer. DHS officials said the officer was seriously injured, but body camera footage released later showed him telling colleagues that he was not seriously hurt.
In several other shootings involving vehicles, not all of which resulted in injuries, the state has used similar language to justify officers’ use of force. DHS says that drivers “weaponize” vehicles in an attempt to chase or outrun federal law enforcement officers. There have been several incidents similar to Good’s murder: a two-second standoff, involving a low-speed car, with a driver who appears to be trying to elude officers, not chase them.
Customs and Border Protection officers and border agents have shot five other people while enforcing Trump’s crackdown in US cities, including Marimar Martinez, a Chicago preschool employee who was shot five times by an agent who later bragged to her friends. The Trump administration accused him of trying to attack the agents, then dropped the charges during his trial it fell.
Paul Hunker, former ICE general counsel in Dallas, told me that federal law provides broad protections to officers who can show they acted in self-defense. “Deadly force may be used when such force is necessary to protect a designated immigration officer or other persons from the risk of death or serious bodily injury,” he said. “That’s the standard.”
Many law enforcement agencies have issued more specific guidelines for the use of force when vehicles are involved. Shooting at moving vehicles is considered very dangerous because stray bullets can hit bystanders. CBP, whose border agents generally have wide latitude to use force to prevent potentially dangerous people from entering the country, issued new guidelines during the Biden administration to curb dangerous high-speed activity. Trump reversed those policies when he took office again.
The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1985 decision in Tennessee v. Garner that officers may shoot a fleeing, unarmed suspect if they believe their safety or the safety of the public is in serious, imminent danger. “It all depends on whether the officer believes there is a danger to the person,” a senior ICE official told me. In 1989, the Court ruled in Graham v. Connor that officers’ actions—including the use of deadly force—must be evaluated on the basis of whether they are “deliberately reasonable” given the full circumstances of the incident.
In a statement, ICE told me that its officers are “trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations” and that they are “extremely trained in de-escalation techniques and receive ongoing use-of-force training.”
DHS has not said if it has body camera footage of Salgado Araujo’s murder. The department has not released photos of the vehicles allegedly damaged by its hit-and-run attempt, and videos posted on social media do not show dents or major damage at the scene.
Ronaldo Salgado said he believes his father panicked when two dark, unmarked SUVs suddenly tried to pull him over. Speaking to reporters in Houston this morning, he said neither his father nor his uncle had a criminal record, and his father had been instructed on how to respect himself when meeting with ICE. “If my father had seen any logos on those cars, he would have obeyed, he would have stopped,” Ronaldo said, referring to the agency’s use of unmarked cars. “He just wanted to get back to work, and back to us.”
Ronaldo said he thinks his father believed he was being attacked by thieves. “He was afraid someone would take his equipment,” Ronaldo said, because they were “how he made a living.”
Ronaldo he said that he and his brother Lorenzo Salgado Jr. are US citizens with college degrees, and their youngest is now getting a degree. For the past year, they had been trying to help their father get a US work permit. He would put them through college and build a big new family home, fulfilling his dream, they said, knowing it could disappear quickly. They found out about their father’s death on social media, Ronaldo said—”not the hospital, not the law enforcement.” The other men who had been riding with their father are now in ICE custody, he said, along with their uncle.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.
