The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who fatally shot Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston this week were looking for a different person when they stopped his vehicle, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed Thursday.
“After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address. Weeks prior to the incident, they noted two white vans at the property,” DHS said. “On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop.”
DHS initially said Tuesday that ICE officers were targeting Salgado Araujo because he was living in the country without legal permission. The department alleged he was shot after he ignored “multiple verbal commands” and attempted to ram an officer who fired his weapon in self-defense. Houston firefighters said Salgado Araujo was struck in the abdomen, and then his car hit an ICE vehicle.
He was taken to the hospital but died of his injuries, according to DHS.
Salgado Araujo, who lived in the U.S. for decades, was driving a crew to a homebuilding site when he was killed, his family and a Texas congresswoman said Wednesday. His son said he had been working toward securing legal status in the U.S. after neglecting to do so for years. The shooting has drawn nationwide scrutiny and calls for an investigation.
Salgado Araujo had no criminal record and was close to obtaining a work permit after living in the U.S. for more than three decades without legal status, his family has said.
Federal officials have not released video or images showing the shooting or damage to the vehicles.
Three men, including Salgado Araujo’s brother, were detained by ICE during the fatal traffic stop, according to Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who has been communicating with their families.
LULAC has yet to obtain video footage that clearly shows what happened during the moments of the shooting and has offered a reward of $5,000 for information from witnesses, Proaño told the AP. The position of Salgado Araujo’s van and ICE vehicles has obstructed security camera footage LULAC has reviewed, he added.
“It’s going to make it even more difficult to find the truth in all this,” he said.
The three men said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after he got out of his vehicle and that the driver didn’t veer in his direction at any point, The Washington Post reports.
The men spoke from immigration detention with lawyer Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who shared their written and oral accounts with the newspaper.
The ICE officer who fatally shot Araujo was not wearing a body camera because officers in that field office were not yet equipped with them, according to a DHS spokesperson.
The officers in Houston “had not been issued body-worn cameras due to back-to-back Democrat shutdowns,” the spokesperson said, blaming a series of government funding lapses that arose when Congress failed to pass measures to fund department and agency operations. There was a 43-day government shutdown in late 2025, as well as a separate 76-day DHS shutdown that started in February and ended in April. The spokesperson said that the shutdown interrupted the body camera procurement process for ICE field offices.
The spokesperson went on to say that half the field offices are now equipped with body cameras, and the other half are expected to receive them in the next 60 days.
The DHS spokesperson said in Thursday’s statement that providing ICE officers with body cameras is a priority, particularly because “our officers are facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them,” adding that the restoration of “historic funding” would provide ICE with necessary resources, “including body cameras.”
U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee, a Democrat who also represents Houston, said if the agents didn’t have the devices, it was because Trump and Republican lawmakers did not want them to be carrying them.
“Houston is done accepting excuses from an agency that has more money than it knows what to do with and still can’t manage basic accountability,” he said in a statement.
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat whose district includes the Houston neighborhood where the shooting occurred, said in an interview on MS Now late Thursday that, “We’ve got to do something. This is just one more death too many. And if we’ve got to bring outside, independent folks to come in and look at it, we should do that.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return an email seeking comment late Thursday.
The Harris County District Attorney’s office said it would conduct an investigation into the shooting. The office is consulting with local prosecutors in Minneapolis, where federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens, to learn how they have navigated investigations into federal immigration agents, spokesperson Rafael Lemaitre said.
“Although access to key evidence remains under federal control, we are pursuing investigative avenues available to us and will conduct a review of any information we collect within our reach,” Lemaitre said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.
