The attorney for three men who were with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo when he was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer said Friday that the agency’s version of the events are “simply false.”
ICE agents fatally shot Salgado Araujo on Tuesday morning during a traffic stop while he was on his way to work. Three other men in the vehicle with Salgado Araujo, including his brother, are now in immigration detention.
An ICE spokesperson previously told Straight Arrow that Salgado Araujo tried to evade arrest, rammed an ICE vehicle, ignored multiple verbal commands and “weaponized his vehicle” while trying to run over an officer.
However, “all three of my clients reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger,” attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said at a Friday news conference.
“The agency’s versions of the killings have varied, and I won’t get into all those different versions,” he said. “But I can tell you with conviction that my clients’ versions of the events are extremely different from what ICE agents are saying or what the agency is saying.”
READ MORE: Why an ICE shooting in Houston isn’t leading to mass protests
According to reporting from the Washington Post, the men say Salgado Araujo did not veer in the officer’s direction. The officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle, they said.
Jose Trinidad Rojas wrote in a handwritten statement obtained by the Post that ICE’s claim that Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and weaponized his own “is a lie.”
“It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over … there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle,” he wrote. “They were on the sides.”
Balderas-Ibarra said he heard the same story in separate interviews with the three men, who are being housed separately while in detention.
“All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra told the Post. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”
ICE agents didn’t wear body cameras
None of the ICE agents involved were wearing body cameras, nor did any of their vehicles have dashboard cameras that captured the shooting, Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, said at the Friday news conference.
“Even after we’ve given ICE specifically $20 million for body cameras, and [former DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem promised in February of this year that she was going to purchase them and get them in the field — that here we were in Houston, that the agents didn’t have them,” Garcia said.
READ MORE: Houston neighborhood looks for answers after fatal ICE shooting
Garcia said acting ICE Director David Venturella told her in a conversation this week that he would ensure all ICE officers in the field are equipped with body cameras by the end of this month.
“Trust me, I will hold him to it, and I will make sure that all my colleagues in Congress and the Democratic Caucus hold him to it,” she said.
In a statement to Straight Arrow, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said government shutdowns disrupted the agency’s ability to purchase and issue body cameras. Now, though, body cameras are being deployed to more than half of ICE’s field offices, and the rest will receive them ” in the next 60 days,” the DHS spokesperson said.
“Providing our ICE law enforcement officers with body cameras has been a priority for DHS—especially as our officers are facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them. The halting of our body-worn camera implementation for our officers is yet another setback resulting from democrat lawmakers refusing to fund DHS. Now thanks to the Secure America Act, ICE has historic funding to provide law enforcement with the resources they need—including body cameras—to make America safe again.”
Venturella, Garcia said, confirmed neither Salgado Araujo, nor his brother, were the target of the immigration operation being carried out.
“The director said that ICE was searching for an individual with a final removal order who officers believed had entered the van, and that they had an administrative warrant,” she said.
Balderas-Ibarra said Salgado Araujo didn’t have a criminal record.
“He had been here in the United States for over 35 years,” he said. “A business owner, he had U.S. citizen children. His only crime was that he fit the description of another man that they were looking for.”
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