ICE keeps using the same justification for killing drivers

On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and a three-decade Houston resident. It was the second ICE-involved shooting this week alone—and since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least ten people.

Now, as hundreds march in Houston and Salgado’s family demands an impartial investigation, DHS is using a familiar playbook: they are blaming Salgado for his own death by asserting he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’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,” Ronaldo Salgado 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 continued at the press conference. By 6:55 his father had been shot by ICE agents who followed him in an unmarked car.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said had Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had attempted to evade arrest and “weaponized his vehicle,” echoing the language used in the hours after an ICE agent shot and killed 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 Renée Good, there were Carlito Ricardo Parias and Marimar Martinez. Both were shot at by federal agents in 2025, and were then accused of trying to ram those agents with their vehicles. Both survived. Ruben Ray Martinez, who was shot by an ICE agent in March of 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 of 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 any of 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 on Wednesday. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.” 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.”