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The killing of a man in Houston at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent has reignited the controversy over President Trump’s hardline policies, which critics contend are gratuitously aggressive and open the door to abuses.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an unauthorized migrant from Mexico and a father of three U.S. citizens, was killed on Tuesday morning during an ICE traffic stop.
The circumstances are hotly disputed. Some social media posts appear to show the aftermath of the encounter, but no video has yet emerged of the moment when Salgado Araujo was shot fatally in the abdomen. He died at a nearby hospital.
An ICE spokesperson told this column that Salgado Araujo “attempted to evade arrest” and added: “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.”
The statement characterized the shooting as an act of self-defense on the agent’s part.
The three people who were with Salgado Araujo say that is just not true, according to an attorney who has communicated with them. One of those men, Jose Trinidad Rojas, called the authorities’ account a “lie” in a handwritten statement first reported by The Washington Post.
The attorney, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, told the Post that all three of the men said the agents were never in front of the van — something that would render implausible the idea that the ICE personnel believed they were about to be run over. Instead, “they came in and started shooting from the sides,” he said.
The death inevitably recalls two killings by federal agents in Minneapolis that roiled the nation and sparked massive protests: Renee Good was shot dead at the wheel of her car by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, and Alex Pretti was killed in the street by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers on Jan. 24.
Both Good and Pretti were U.S. citizens who were protesting Trump’s enforcement policies.
In Good’s case, video analysis showed her turning her car’s wheels away from the agent who ultimately shot her. In Pretti’s case, allegations from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that he had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement” were contradicted by video evidence. The legal firearm Pretti possessed — but was not holding — appears to have been removed from him in the moments before he was shot multiple times.
The period after those killings saw then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem leave her post and controversial, high-profile CBP officer Greg Bovino moved to a less prominent role. Polls showed large majorities of the American public believing that the killings of Good and Pretti were unjustified.
There have been other, less prominent examples, too. The New York Times reported on Thursday that, “Since last year, federal agents have fired on at least 21 people, many of whom were shot in their vehicles. Five people, including three U.S. citizens, were killed as a result.”
On Wednesday, a man was shot and killed in Memphis by agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). That came after Sunday’s fatal shooting of 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson by Tennessee National Guard troops in the same city.
The Salgado Araujo killing has stirred even more political debate.
A Democratic congresswoman who represents the Houston area, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), told MS Now on Thursday that she had been told by the acting ICE director that the dead man was “not a target” of the ICE action in which he was killed.
Garcia added: “They’re saying he weaponized the car, that he refused orders, that he was going to run over them and that they shot him in self-defense. He was the driver. How did they shoot him in the right side of his stomach?”
Other Democratic figures have also weighed in.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) reaffirmed his call to “Abolish ICE” in a social media post where he backed a demand from the deceased man’s family to have an independent investigation.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote that “Trump’s DHS Secretary should get hauled in front of Congress to answer for every shooting,” adding “This cannot stand.”
Chuck Rocha, a senior Democratic strategist, told this column that a traumatic event like the Houston shooting underscores the misgivings many in the Latino community now have about Trump.
“It just shows that there is a reason for the anxiety in the Latino community right now,” Rocha said. “There were a lot of these Latinos who voted for Donald Trump because they believed in the statements that he was going to secure our border and deport criminals.”
He added: “They just didn’t know that it was Donald Trump who would be making the determination of who the ‘criminals’ are, and it could be because of a speeding ticket or because you came here 30 years ago. That’s why people are really p—ed.”
Rocha’s comment also underscored the political complexity of the immigration issue even within the Latino community, however.
When Trump first ran for the presidency in 2016, various commentators proclaimed that his hardline rhetoric would doom him with Hispanics. In fact, the 28 percent of Latinos who voted for him that year was almost identical to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s performance.
Trump has improved his share of the Latino vote in the two subsequent elections he has contested, hitting a high of 46 percent in his 2024 victory over then-Vice President Harris.
Those results point to the salience of economic and cultural issues as well as the knotty politics of immigration.
Daniel Garza, who worked in former President George W. Bush’s administration and is now the founder and president of the right-leaning, Hispanic-focused Libre Initiative, argued that there was a need for balance, but not laxity, in immigration policy.
Latino voters want “compassion but also clear limits,” he told this column. He pushed back on the “demonization” of ICE and said, “We are not asking to defund ICE or make America be one big sanctuary city.”
At the same time, Garza acknowledged that, within the Latino community, “We are very sympathetic to the plight of immigrants … Some people will tilt the scales to ’just enforcement.’ That’s not where it is.”
The politics of immigration, of course, go far beyond the Latino community.
Complaints about overly aggressive enforcement actions also fuse, for many liberal Americans, with what they see as a larger issue: Trump’s propensity to use the powers of the government in overly expansive and aggressive ways.
Given the traumatic nature of Salgado Araujo’s death and the dispute over what took place, the debate won’t disappear anytime soon.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
Add as preferred source on Google Tags Chuck Rocha Donald Trump Kristi Noem Patty Murray Stephen Miller Sylvia Garcia Zohran MamdaniCopyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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