ICE Shot a Man Through His Window. Witnesses Say No Officer Was Ever in Danger.

What DHS Said Happened vs. What the Witnesses Say Happened

The Department of Homeland Security's story goes like this: ICE officers tried to stop Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's white van, he ignored multiple verbal commands, then rammed his vehicle into an ICE agent, and that agent fired in self-defense. Araujo was struck in the abdomen. He was taken to a hospital and died.

Here is what the three men sitting inside that van are telling their lawyer, according to CBS News: the shots came from the side, not the front. No ICE agent was standing in front of the vehicle. No officer was in any position to be rammed. Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said at a Friday news conference that his clients were unambiguous. "They confirmed that at no point was an ICE agent directly in front of the vehicle," he said. "They also confirmed the shots came from the side, not from the front."

The officers were not wearing body cameras. ICE has released no photos, no video, no forensic evidence of any kind. DHS blamed the absence of body cameras on "back-to-back Democrat shutdowns," which is a sentence that exists in the world now. Images of the van taken after the shooting appear to show no damage to it, according to Balderas-Ibarra.

They Weren't Even Looking for Him

It gets worse. DHS confirmed on Thursday that ICE officers were not originally targeting Salgado Araujo at all. They were looking for someone else entirely. According to a DHS statement, officers had conducted surveillance on a different person's address weeks earlier and noted two white vans at that property. On July 7th, while driving to that address, they spotted a white van with someone inside who "resembled" their actual target and decided to make a stop.

That's it. That is the full legal and factual basis for the stop that ended Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's life. He drove a white van and looked like somebody.

Texas Rep. Sylvia Garcia, whose district covers the Houston neighborhood where this happened, said the acting ICE director told her that officers believed someone in the van had a final order of removal, but declined to share that person's name. Garcia pointed out something else worth sitting with: the ICE vehicles that stopped the van were unmarked and had no lights. "What would you do if you were being followed by someone and the cars were unmarked?" she asked at the same news conference.

A Man Who Spent 35 Years Building a Life Here

Salgado Araujo was not a ghost or an abstraction. He was a homebuilder. He was 52 years old. He had lived in the United States for more than 35 years. His family says he had no criminal record and was close to completing the long legal process of obtaining formal status when he was shot dead on his way to a job site with his crew.

His brother was one of the three men in the van and is now in ICE custody. The other detained men also have no criminal records, according to family members who have managed to briefly speak with them. No one in that van, by any account including DHS's own, had a warrant out or any unresolved legal trouble beyond their immigration status.

Now ICE Is Trying to Deport the Witnesses

This is the part where it stops being a tragedy with disputed facts and starts looking like something else. CBS News reports that ICE is pressuring the three detained witnesses to self-deport, which their attorney says would effectively destroy the investigation before it can get started. "It is extremely important that we preserve the integrity of this investigation," Balderas-Ibarra said. "That will all be out the window if they are deported."

Juana Degollado, whose stepfather Daniel Tirado Pantoja is one of the detained men, told CBS News that the pressure to sign deportation documents is real and ongoing. An ICE spokesperson told CBS News that "it is categorically false we would pressure someone to self-deport." That denial sits alongside the fact that the witnesses are currently in ICE custody, where ICE controls what documents they are asked to sign.

Local prosecutors are not sitting still. They were not invited into the federal investigation, but CBS News reports they have spent the past three days in the Houston neighborhood canvassing for surveillance footage and talking to witnesses on their own. The League of United Latin American Citizens has posted a $5,000 reward for any video of the shooting, though the positioning of the vehicles blocked most nearby cameras from capturing it.

This Is Not the First Time

Salgado Araujo was at least the eighth person to die during the Trump administration's immigration enforcement campaign, according to CBS News. Not one immigration officer has been charged in any of those killings. And in several of the previous cases, video footage that emerged afterward directly contradicted what federal officers initially claimed had happened.

DHS has declined to release the shooting officer's name, citing safety concerns. The agency has also not answered basic questions about how long that officer has worked for ICE or whether anyone involved is currently on administrative leave. The name of the person ICE was actually looking for that day has not been released either.