The Mexican man living in the US who was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not the person that federal officials were targeting when they operated on him in Houston, US Attorney Sylvia Garcia said Thursday.
The Democratic Congresswoman, whose district includes the Houston area where the incident occurred, said acting ICE Director David Venturella told her the agency had confirmed that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “was not a target.”
Salgado Araujo was a real estate developer who had lived in the US for more than 35 years, had no criminal record and was about to complete a lengthy process to obtain legal status when he was killed early Tuesday, according to his family.
“We have to do something. This is one more death,” Garcia said in an interview with MS Now. “And if we have to bring outside, independent people to come in and look at it, we have to do that.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety did not immediately return an email seeking comment late Thursday.
DHS, which oversees ICE, previously said federal officials were conducting a targeted operation to detain someone without legal status when they tried to stop a car driven by Salgado Araujo. The agency said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and that a government official fired a weapon in self-defense.
When asked if the ICE agents went directly to Salgado Araujo, DHS said last Thursday that the police were monitoring the area where they saw two white vans.
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“On the 7th of July, the police had almost reached their destination when they saw a white van with a person similar to the one who was targeted, the police stopped the car,” said the Department.
The federal agents were not wearing body-worn cameras, DHS said, and few photos or videos surrounding the incident have become public in the days since the encounter, unlike other deaths involving immigration officials.
In a statement, the DHS said agents at the scene in Houston had not taken off their body cameras, blaming them on Democrats and the government shutdown prompted by President Donald Trump’s attack on immigration.
US Representative Christian Menefee, a Democrat who also represents Houston, said that if agents don’t have these tools, it’s because Trump and Republican lawmakers don’t want them to carry them.
“Houston is done accepting the excuse of an agency that has more money than it knows what to do with and can’t control basic accountability,” he said in a statement.
The Harris County district attorney’s office said it will conduct an investigation into the shooting. The office is negotiating with local prosecutors in Minneapolis, where federal agents shot and killed two American citizens, to learn how to investigate the investigation by immigration agents, said their spokesman Rafael Lemaitre.
“While access to key evidence remains under agency control, we are pursuing investigative avenues available to us and will review any information we gather that we are able to access,” Lemaitre said in an emailed statement.
Three men, including Salgado Araujo’s brother, were arrested by ICE during a traffic stop, according to Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who has been in contact with their families.
LULAC has yet to find videos that clearly show what happened during the shooting and has offered a $5,000 reward for information from witnesses, Proaño told The Associated Press. The parking of Salgado Araujo’s van and ICE vehicles blocked the updated LULAC security camera footage, he added.
“It will make it even more difficult to find the truth in all of this,” he said.
DHS said the ICE agents involved in the incident are expected to receive body-worn cameras within the next 60 days.
After the deadly Minneapolis shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats refused to fund ICE and the Border Patrol without changes to those services designed to increase accountability and transparency. Republicans in Congress eventually passed legislative funding for ICE and CBP for three years.
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