Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction contractor and father of three, was a “man of routine,” 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 houses in the Houston area. Salgado Araujo came across the border from Mexico as a teenager and had been working without legal status for 35 years. Yesterday he left in his work van to pick up his brother and two other men en route to a job. A team of ICE officers, traveling in two unmarked SUVs, was looking for one of the men. Exactly what happened next is unclear.
As the officers attempted to stop the van, according to the Department of Homeland Security, Salgado Araujo ignored their commands and smashed into their vehicles. An officer drew his weapon and shot Salgado Araujo in the stomach. A video posted to social media showed a man face down in the street and moaning in pain, with his hands behind his back and two officers over him. Salgado Araujo died at a Houston hospital hours later.
DHS, in a brief statement, said that Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”
The killing was the first fatal shooting by ICE officers since the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7. (Another protester, Alex Pretti, was killed by border agents two weeks later.) This time, Trump-administration officials did not rush to blame the dead for acts of “domestic terrorism,” as they did following the Good and Pretti shootings. They have announced an internal DHS investigation into the ICE officer’s actions, as well as an FBI probe to determine whether Salgado Araujo committed assault before he was shot.
Senior ICE officials I spoke with said they have received few details about what happened. The ICE officer who shot Salgado Araujo was a veteran with more than two decades’ 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 don’t believe DHS’s claims, and some groups are offering a cash reward for video footage. “Remember Minneapolis? Remember Renee Good? Has ICE learned nothing from that experience?” asked Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents a Houston congressional district, during a press conference today with Salgado Araujo’s adult sons.
White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and the other administration officials leading President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign have insisted in recent months that they’ve shifted away from the kind of roving street patrols that triggered clashes in Minneapolis. ICE teams have returned to the “targeted enforcement” tactics the agency has traditionally used, they say. It’s a more deliberate approach in which officers plan their operations in advance and attempt to take suspects into custody as safely as possible.
What’s different about targeted operations now is that they’re more often aimed at people in vehicles, according to senior ICE officials I spoke with. Officers used to rely more on a tactic they called “knock and talk,” in which they would arrive at a suspect’s home and coax them to open the door. But word has gotten out—through legal clinics, advocacy organizations, and social media—that officers need a judicial warrant to force their way inside. Almost no one opens their door for ICE anymore.
[Read: How do you prove your citizenship?]
That has left ICE officers attempting to make more arrests by catching their targets leaving homes or heading to work, usually in cars. Some large police departments have vehicle-pursuit policies with guidelines for when deadly force is appropriate. Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, trains its agents using an Emergency Driving Handbook. But ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch responsible for immigration arrests and deportations, doesn’t have a handbook, let alone a vehicle-pursuit policy, relying instead on broad use-of-force guidelines. ICE officers receive less training in conducting vehicle stops than most police officers, the officials told me. One senior ICE official—who, like others, wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters—acknowledged that it’s a problem.
“Our operations are not at residences any longer. They’re more out in the open,” he told me. “Our tactics and our training and our policies all have to be looked at because the majority of our operations used to be more controlled, at residences, and you had less of these issues to worry about.”
ICE’s street-level arrest operations have traditionally been handled by specialized teams. But the administration has been ramping up enforcement for the president’s mass-deportation campaign and sending far more officers into the streets. Last week, arrests averaged roughly 2,000 a day nationwide, nearly double the pace of this spring, ICE officials told me. Trump officials say they are prioritizing “the worst of the worst,” meaning those with violent criminal histories, but Homan said on Fox News on Monday that only about half of those taken into custody have criminal records. “ICE has broken historic records every single day,” he said. “We’re going to add more resources, and we’re going to add more targeting. We’ve got millions of people we need to find.”
[Read: The truth about ICE’s recruiting push]
After a hiring spree last fall, ICE has doubled its number of deportation officers, but they receive relatively little training in vehicle stops, two officials told me. They’re working in plainclothes and driving unmarked cars, and they’re authorized to shoot to kill if they think a suspect is driving in a way that poses a threat.
There have been at least 16 ICE 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 U.S. citizen, as he maneuvered aggressively through a late-night checkpoint on South Padre Island, in Texas. In September, as Trump sent border agents into Chicago, an ICE officer fatally shot a 38-year-old cook and father of two from Mexico, Silverio Villegas González, who tried to drive away during a traffic stop, dragging an officer. DHS officials said the officer was severely injured, but body-camera footage released later showed him telling colleagues that he was not seriously hurt.
In several of the other shooting incidents involving vehicles, not all of which resulted in injuries, the government has used similar language to justify officers’ use of force. DHS says that drivers “weaponize” vehicles by attempting to ram or run over federal law-enforcement officers. There have been several incidents similar to Good’s killing: a split-second encounter involving a vehicle moving at a low speed and a driver who appears to be trying to get away from officers, not run them down.
Customs and Border Protection officers and border agents have shot at five others while carrying out Trump’s crackdown in U.S. cities, including Marimar Martinez, the Chicago preschool worker who was shot five times by an agent who later bragged about it to his friends. The Trump administration accused her of trying to attack the agents, then dropped the charges when its case fell apart.
Paul Hunker, ICE’s former chief counsel in Dallas, told me that federal law affords broad protections to officers who can demonstrate they acted in self-defense. “Deadly force can be used when such force is necessary to protect the designated immigration officer or other persons from imminent danger of death or serious physical injuries,” he said. “That’s the standard.”
Many law-enforcement agencies have issued more specific use-of-force guidelines when vehicles are involved. Shooting at moving cars is considered especially risky because errant bullets can strike bystanders. CBP, whose border agents generally have broader latitude to use force to prevent potentially dangerous individuals from entering the country, issued new guidelines during the Biden administration discouraging dangerous high-speed pursuits. Trump rescinded the policies when he retook office.
The Supreme Court ruled in the landmark 1985 decision in Tennessee v. Garner that officers can shoot at a fleeing, unarmed suspect if they believe that their safety or public safety is at serious, imminent risk. “All of it hinges on whether the officer believes there is a danger to someone,” 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 “objectively reasonable” given the full circumstances of an 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 “highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”
[Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’ ]
DHS has not said whether it possesses body-camera footage of Salgado Araujo’s killing. The department has not published photos of vehicles allegedly damaged by his attempt to flee, and videos posted to social media do not appear to show dents or major damage at the scene.
Ronaldo Salgado said he believes that his father panicked when two unmarked dark SUVs suddenly tried to box him in. 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 comport himself during an encounter with ICE. “Had my father seen any emblems on those cars, he would have complied, he would have stopped,” Ronaldo said, referring to the agency’s use of unmarked cars. “He only wanted to get back to work, and back to us.”
Ronaldo said he thinks his father believed he was being assaulted by thieves. “He feared someone would take his tools,” Ronaldo said, because they were “how he made his livelihood.”
Ronaldo said that he and his brother Lorenzo Salgado Jr. are American citizens with college degrees, and their younger brother is now getting a degree. For the past year, they’d been trying to help their father obtain U.S. work authorization. He’d put them through college and built a large new family home, achieving his dream, they said, knowing it could be gone in a flash. They found out about their father’s death from social media, Ronaldo said—“not the hospital, not law enforcement.” The other men who were riding in the van with their father are now in ICE custody, he said, including their uncle.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed to this report.