Ronaldo Salgado wiped tears from his eyes as he sat before a panel of U.S. Congress members last Friday. “How many more of our dads have to die? How many more children have to wait hopelessly for answers? How many more wives will have to suffer the loss of their life partner?”
And there’s another question Houstonians have been asking since Salgado’s father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was shot inside his van by an ICE agent while on his way to work July 7.
“How do we get ICE out of Houston?”
Araujo’s death attracted national attention and scrutiny. The FBI admitted that Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who has lived in Houston for 35 years, wasn’t their target. The still-unidentified ICE agent who fired the fatal shot immediately claimed self-defense, but three witnesses — who are now being detained in an ICE facility in Conroe — say Araujo did not ram another vehicle or try to run over an officer.
The officers weren’t wearing body cameras and their vehicles weren’t equipped with dash cams. The federal government has yet to turn over evidence such as call logs and email correspondence to Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, who is conducting an independent investigation and has said that charges could be filed against the shooter — once they know who he is.
Protesters have packed City Hall each week since Araujo’s death and plan to do so again on Tuesday, July 28, at the monthly evening public comment session, which begins at 5 p.m. They will likely reiterate their demands, the most prominent of which is, “ICE out of Houston.”
It’s widely believed that the Houston City Council isn’t going to accomplish much by telling the federal government what cities it should conduct immigration enforcement in, how to do traffic stops and whether they have to wear body cameras when doing so — but the City Council, week after week, is the body hearing the battle cries.
That’s because it’s the best way to maintain public pressure and ensure the story stays in the media, said Sergio Lira, president of Greater Houston LULAC and a former Houston ISD board member.
Lira grew up in Magnolia Park, where the shooting occurred, and said the area is now a “ghost town,” as more people are afraid to leave their homes or go to public buildings. However, he said he’s also seen a resurgence of community activism from people who live in other parts of the city and those who have traveled from the suburbs for marches and protests.
In a march on Sunday, Lira carried a large cross for the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church but when he became overwhelmed by the heat and a swollen ankle, he handed the cross to Ronaldo Salgado. “That was divine intervention. I whispered in his ear, You’re carrying the cross for your family, and you carry the cross for the community,” Lira said.
Such powerful moments don’t immediately effect change but they do create unity, the LULAC leader said, noting that activists understand that immigration reform has to come from the federal government.
“City Hall is an open venue that reflects the city much more than Harris County Commissioners Court, and they’re not going to all drive to Austin to tell Governor Abbott to do something,” Lira said. “I understand civil disobedience, advocacy, marching and protesting. From a historical context, from civil rights to women’s suffrage to anti-war, every single movement has led to some sort of reform. All of that was because people refused to remain quiet and sit on the sidelines.”
In addition to independent investigations being led by Teare and the Texas Rangers, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General is also investigating. Critics say they don’t put much stock in the government’s probe of itself.
Earlier this year, At-Large City Houston City Council Member Alejandra Salinas successfully pushed through an ordinance limiting ICE’s interaction with the Houston Police Department, but the policy was watered down after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to pull $114 million in public safety funding from Houston just before the FIFA World Cup came to town.
Salinas said at a July 22 community meeting at the Magnolia Multi-Service Center that, at the time of Araujo’s shooting, Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Police Chief Noe Diaz said the city didn’t have any jurisdiction to investigate. Whitmire and Diaz have since said they are cooperating with investigators and have turned over the official 911 call and video footage from a METRO bus. Whitmire has also called for a moratorium on ICE enforcement actions so agents can get trained in de-escalation tactics.
Salinas also pointed out last week that HPD’s average rate of monthly calls to ICE more than doubled, with over 100 calls made between April and June of this year and 19 Houstonians turned over to ICE custody. “HPD should be focused on solving crime, not doing the job of ICE,” she said.
Council member Joaquin Martinez grew up in Houston’s East End, the district he now represents and the neighborhood where Araujo was killed. At last week’s Congressional Hispanic Caucus hearing, he said that when the government takes a life, it has an obligation to explain it.
“That obligation has not been met yet,” he said. “Trust in government has been damaged and that has consequences for every city in America. This tragedy is bigger than one incident. It has exposed the human cost of a broken immigration system and reminded us that the consequences of federal policies are felt first in our cities and our neighborhoods.”
Lira said he supports Whitmire and Martinez, acknowledging that they’ve taken a lot of heat for voting in favor of the “Abbott amendment” that walked back Salinas’ ordinance limiting HPD cooperation. “Twelve others voted for that amendment,” Lira said. “Why haven’t they been singled out? Why haven’t they spoken up on this issue?”
In response to a question on how ICE could be removed from Houston, Lira said that “has to be done through Congress when they stop the funding for that agency and automatically the cause and effect would be to shut that agency down. The community can urge them to do that by strong advocacy. And we’re hoping and praying that the Democrats get the majority in November.”
Community activist Neil Aquino, founder of the Houston Democracy Project, said the protesters aren’t necessarily expecting that the Houston City Council will round up ICE agents and run them out of town.
“From my perspective, council is just one place where protests are happening,” he said. “It’s decentralized. There are groups like [the Democratic Socialists of America] or an independent person standing on a bridge. There was a meaningful protest in Conroe, in Montgomery County. There’s a new protest in League City, in Galveston County. And there is a belief that council can do something about it because they did pass an ordinance, which did for a week change how we interacted with ICE.
“I can’t tell you the motives of the groups, but what I think it’s doing is we are organizing ourselves, as Houstonians,” he added. “We are focusing on our own strength. What Mayor Whitmire and his council allies do is delegitimize protesters by implying they’re ignorant. We understand that Donald Trump is [in power]. We understand that Greg Abbott makes threats to defund the police if we have an ordinance, but all of these people are elected officials who decided to be in office during an authoritarian white supremacist threat.”
Although Houston City Council positions are nonpartisan, Aquino says there are six Republican members who could at any time say that the ICE shooting was wrong. Their silence is something he hopes voters remember when they go to the polls. “They’re getting a free pass in many respects because authoritarianism requires a local infrastructure,” he said. “If three council Republicans called a press conference and said ICE is wrong for Houston, that would make the news.”
When asked whether a boycott on local businesses or weekly protests will reform ICE, Aquino says every protest, rally and march provides new connections and a learning experience for those involved. Every sizable protest in the Houston area now has volunteer medics and “protest marshals” to ensure the environment is safe for attendees. “We did that ourselves,” he said. “If we don’t organize ourselves, we won’t have any strength.”
The council has historically responded to public pressure, Aquino pointed out, noting that Whitmire first said the city couldn’t investigate because it lacked jurisdiction, then later said he would cooperate to the fullest extent possible and turn over any evidence his departments could gather.
So what does Aquino want from the Houston City Council? “What I want, at 58 years old, is free elections. I want ICE to stop killing people and violating due process. I don’t want a masked secret police. And I want a city council and a mayor who will show up for me in that capacity. All we’re asking for is to stop shooting people.”
Last Friday’s two-plus-hour hearing on Araujo’s death ended shortly before investigators announced that a “crystal-like” substance found in the slain man’s van was in fact electrolyte powder, not methamphetamine. Critics have said the FBI’s claim that it suspected Araujo was in possession of narcotics was a flimsy attempt to paint the immigrant construction worker as a criminal.
Araujo had no criminal record and was in the process of securing his citizenship. ICE agents admitted after the shooting incident that Araujo was not their intended target.
“We can now confirm that the substance found in Lorenzo Salgado’s van was not a narcotic or any other illicit substance,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia wrote on social media on July 24. “As his family has said all along, this was an electrolyte powder to stay hydrated [while] working outside in the hot Texas summer. The attempt to cast a shadow over Lorenzo Salgado’s name has failed.”
Teare has said that federal authorities have not been cooperative in sharing evidence with local authorities, which he says is unprecedented. The DA’s office investigates every officer-involved fatality within its jurisdiction and is usually invited to the scene immediately, Teare said.
Teare has filed for temporary visas so that the witnesses to Araujo’s death — his brother Victor Salgado and work crew members Daniel Tirado Pantoja and José Trinidad Rojas — are not deported while the investigation is being conducted.
Araujo’s son Ronaldo Salgado, an American citizen and teacher at Houston ISD’s Eastwood Academy, told Congress members how the morning of July 7 unfolded for him and his family.
“He and my mom woke up before the sun,” Salgado said of his father. “She cooked him a big meal to carry him through the day. He said goodbye to her and to our dog, said a prayer in his van and was out of the driveway before 6 a.m. to pick up his construction crew, men he’d worked alongside for years, family men who took great pride in their craft to provide for their own families. One of these men was our dear uncle.”
At 7 a.m., Salgado and his brothers heard from their mom that their dad was in trouble.
Salgado said he learned from a Facebook post that there had been an ICE-related incident at Canal and Wayside in Houston’s East End. He went to the site and saw his father’s van but did not see his father. He said he asked law enforcement, homeowners and business people what happened but got no answers.
“I learned again from a Facebook post that our dad had been shot, not because I could see him but because I could hear his voice on videos posted online, crying for help,” Salgado said. According to the witnesses, Araujo’s last words were, “Me estan matando,” which translates to, “They’re killing me.”
Salgado was joined at last Friday’s hearing by his brother, Lorenzo Salgado Jr., who described their father as a humble, hard-working family man who “didn’t need anyone to know his name.”
“He taught us that good things come to those who work hard,” Lorenzo Salgado Jr. said. “As a family, we talked more than once about what would happen if our dad encountered ICE officers. We dreaded the call but we were prepared. We believed there would be a process and that no matter what happened, there would be a way for our dad to come home.”
Teare, who took office in January 2025, has said he is confident his office will determine the identity of the ICE agent who fired the fatal shot but he doesn’t believe that information will come from the federal government. “We do this every day,” Teare said. “We are a massive office and we are really good at investigating cases. I can assure the public that we will be able to identify who killed Mr. Salgado and we will assess whether criminal charges are appropriate.”
Ronaldo Salgado said he believed his father would have stopped if the ICE agents had been in clearly marked vehicles and identified themselves. The family has maintained that Araujo likely thought the vehicles pursuing him were driven by thieves wishing to take his construction tools.
“I know my father would have stopped his vehicle immediately if ICE agents had clearly identified themselves rather than aggressively approaching him in two unmarked vehicles without emergency lights on,” Ronaldo Salgado said. “That must have been terrifying, not knowing who was after him.”
The brothers urged members of Congress to take action and demand justice.
“When I was at Ben Taub Hospital, pacing through the hallways, waiting for an answer, the Congresswoman [Sylvia Garcia] stepped up and marched into the lobby in her powerful pink suit jacket and demanded to speak with the higher-ups to finally get the confirmation that my dad had died,” Ronaldo Salgado said.
Garcia, represents the Magnolia Park area where Araujo was killed, but will lose that part of her district at the end of the year due to a Republican-led gerrymandering effort that passed last summer. Garcia said at last week’s hearing that parents in the community are afraid to drive their children to school; laborers are afraid to go to work; and seniors are afraid to go to church, buy groceries and go to doctor’s appointments.
“On July 7, our community’s worst fears became a tragic reality when a federal enforcement operation ended with the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo,” Garcia said. “Since that day, families across Houston have been asking the same questions: How did this happen? Could it have been prevented? Who will be held accountable?”
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, along with Houston-based U.S. Reps. Lizzie Fletcher and Christian Menefee, questioned during last week’s hearing why the ICE officers weren’t wearing body cameras and didn’t have dash cams in their vehicles, even though Congress allocated more than $20 million last year for such equipment.
Congressman Adriano Espaillat, D-New York, who chaired the hearing, said the entire nation “is watching this case.” Espaillat became in 2017 the first formerly undocumented immigrant elected to the U.S. Congress. He noted during the hearing the similarities between Araujo’s death and that of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Guerrero, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine, just a week later.
“Eight people have been killed at the hands of federal immigration officers, including two U.S. citizens in the state of Minnesota,” Espaillat said. “These two tragedies could have been prevented. They are the result of a mass deportation effort led by this [Trump] administration that has allocated $113 billion to ICE, setting arrest quotas at 2,000 per day. Twelve thousand ICE recruits have been hired. There’s been a surge in hiring and a reduction in training. The use of deadly force has not been addressed.”
ICE, the FBI and the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security were invited to the hearing and refused to attend, Espaillat said.
Ronaldo Salgado asked that the members of Congress use their authority to demand justice for their father and for the families of others who have died at the hands of federal agents.
“Every single member of Congress has immigrants living in your states, in your districts, in your neighborhoods,” he said. “What is being done to make sure that they can live without fear, to make sure that they won’t be next?”
The brothers called for a “thorough, truly independent investigation, not one where the agency under investigation also controls the evidence and is able to unilaterally clear its own personnel of any wrongdoing.”
They asked that the timeline of the investigation be made public and that every piece of evidence be preserved and shared, including recorded radio traffic, agency communications and any video or audio footage that exists. They also demanded the immediate release of the three members of Araujo’s work crew.
“Removal of these individuals and a failure to assure them of their safety would amount to nothing less than a cover-up,” Ronaldo Salgado said.
Lorenzo Salgado Jr. urged those in attendance at the hearing and those watching the livestream to “try to put yourselves in my and Ronnie’s shoes.”
“I want you, in your mind, to think of a loved one — your brother, your father, your cousin, a beloved co-worker,” he said. “Picture their face and silently say their first and last name. Picture that loved one’s face, pinned to the ground, in pain and yelling out in desperate need of help. Picture the anger and helplessness of watching that person bleed out in a video on your phone. What would you do after? How would you cope with the feeling of losing your protector, your role model, your mother’s loving partner, your grandmother’s little boy?”
“You wouldn’t cower and let bygones be bygones,” he added. “You would surely move mountains, go hungry, without sleep, marching incessantly toward the slow beating drum of justice.”
