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An attorney for the family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston man killed by immigration agents, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ account of the shooting is “completely false.”
Hugo Balderas-Ibarra spoke with three men who were in the vehicle with Salgado Araujo at the time of the shooting of Tuesday, saying they each contradicted the account of ICE, which said the driver had attempted to use his vehicle as a weapon.
“After speaking with these three men that were in the vehicle with Lorenzo, I have no doubt that what these ICE agents are saying is completely false. At no point did they ever use the van to ram into the ICE agents, and at no point were these ICE agents’ lives ever in any danger,” Balderas-Ibarra said in a video posted to Instagram on Friday.
“We are demanding an independent investigation so that we can get them the justice and the answers that they deserve. The ICE agents’ accounts of what happened do not reflect, and are very inconsistent with the stories – with the recollection that I got from the three people that were in the vehicle with Lorenzo.”
Salgado Araujo was shot in the abdomen by ICE officers and then taken to a hospital where he later died.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not immediately respond to request for comment on Balderas-Ibarra’s assertion.
But it has maintained that Salgado Araujo attempted to harm its agents.
“The driver of the vehicle, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo—an illegal alien from Mexico—attempted to evade arrest. From information we are receiving, he 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.
That detail is in dispute.
The three coworkers with Salgado Araujo at the time of the incident told Balderas-Ibarra that ICE agents surrounded the van he was driving.
In accounts first shared with The Washington Post, the men, now being held in detention centers, said they were approached from the side.
The men said it was ICE, in unmarked cars, that initially rammed their slow-moving van before pulling on each side of the vehicle.
“That is a lie,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, wrote in a statement obtained by the outlet. “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. They were on the sides.”
The Hill has reached out to Balderas-Ibarra’s office for the witness statements.
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