A death during an ICE traffic stop raises outrage in Houston—and in Mexico.
In the second decade of the twentieth century—a period that became known as la Matanza—the killing of residents of Mexican descent was commonplace along the United States’ southern border. People were tortured, hanged, beheaded, and summarily shot, in many cases by the Texas Rangers, an ill-trained but rapidly growing force. Often, Rangers would release a captive, then shoot him as he ran off, so that they could claim he had been trying to evade arrest. No one ever faced justice for these killings. It was left to the victims’ families to piece together evidence, which historians of the border have used to show the myriad ways that the past seeps into the present.
Last month, the image of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo being pinned to the ground, his torso pierced by a bullet, became the latest evocation of that history. Salgado was fifty-two, and had been living in Texas for more than three decades. He had migrated from central Mexico and earned a reputation for fixing and building homes around Houston. His application for a work permit was well under way when Donald Trump returned to the White House, promising “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
On the morning of July 7th, Salgado left his home in the neighborhood of Magnolia Park, Houston, heading for work. An hour later, his wife called their oldest son, Ronaldo. She and Salgado had followed their usual morning routine: they had woken up at dawn, she had cooked breakfast, and he had been out the door before six, to pick up three colleagues who had worked with him for years. Now she feared that Salgado was in trouble. Ronaldo rushed to his father’s jobsite, but there was no one there. Then he learned that ICE had been in Magnolia Park, so he sped off to where agents were last seen. Salgado’s van was there, but he was not.
This was not the plan that Salgado and his family had devised for what to do if he was detained by ICE: he’d make sure not to sign any papers, and he’d place a call to his family. “Lorenzo Salgado believed there was a process that would allow him, one way or another, to find his way home,” David Donatti, a senior staff attorney at the A.C.L.U. of Texas, which is representing Salgado’s family, said. “The key assumption that separates 2026 from 1910 is an assumption of process. And this case is an example of that breaking down.”
In fact, ICE was already in the process of covering up facts. It issued a statement declaring that Salgado had been pulled over and tried to evade capture: he had “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.” ICE insisted that the agent had fired his weapon in self-defense, even though there was no body-camera footage to support that claim.
As the F.B.I. opened an investigation, the case’s material witnesses—the three men riding in the car with Salgado—had been removed to a detention center outside of town. The congresswoman Sylvia Garcia, who represents Magnolia Park, warned that the men were being pressured to self-deport to Mexico. But, through their lawyers, they began trying to correct the record.
Salgado’s brother, Victor Hugo, had been riding in the van’s passenger seat that morning. As they headed toward the interstate, unmarked vehicles began tailing them, driving recklessly. It was impossible to tell who was behind the wheel—the cars’ windows were tinted—but there were no sirens. After about twenty minutes of pursuit, Salgado decided to pull over. One of the men who’d followed them ran up to Victor’s window and yelled, “Stop!,” before quickly firing his gun. The bullet apparently whipped across the cab and struck Salgado in the stomach. As blood poured from Salgado’s body, other men swarmed the van, and Victor was yanked outside. That was when he saw that the shooter wore an ICE lanyard. Soon afterward, he noticed that the shooter had switched guns with another agent.
Victor was handcuffed and forced to kneel. An agent shoved his hand into Victor’s pocket, pulled out his I.D., and examined it, declaring, “Mexicans!” On the other side of the car, another ICE agent was restraining Salgado against the ground, handcuffing him. Victor could hear his brother’s cries for help: “Me están matando”—they’re killing me. When an ambulance arrived, more than twenty minutes later, Salgado looked unconscious. Sometime later, he died.
The case attracted scrutiny from the press and local officials, and in less than forty-eight hours ICE was hedging its story: Salgado wasn’t the man the agents were targeting, after all. They were looking for two Guatemalan men, who presumably owned a white van similar to Salgado’s. In cases involving a fatal engagement with law enforcement, it is common for local authorities to carry out their own investigation, to determine whether state criminal laws were violated. But, when Harris County began investigating, the Department of Homeland Security operated like a “black box,” according to the district attorney, Sean Teare. It cut off access to basic physical evidence, including the weapon that was fired. Teare questioned the van mixup: ICE, he said, would have had a license-plate number for whatever vehicle it was looking for.
The F.B.I. obtained a search warrant for Salgado’s van, claiming that one of its agents had spotted small bags of a “white crystal-like substance” inside. In an apparent effort to link Salgado to narcotics, the F.B.I. immediately made the warrant public—something that Teare had not seen in two decades in law enforcement. Salgado’s family heard the news as they were making preparations for his funeral. They responded that the substance in the bags was salt. Salgado’s wife would mix it with baking soda, for him to pour into jugs of water and lime juice—a homemade electrolyte to help him work through hot summer days. The F.B.I. tested bags recovered from the van, but the lab results came back negative. This time, the Bureau did not publicize its findings.
Salgado’s killing galvanized the local Hispanic community; Houstonians filled the site with flowers, votive candles, balloons, and notes of solidarity. It also resonated in Mexico, in a way that no death involving ICE had before. Though Trump has not addressed Salgado’s killing, Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, condemned it outright. She had already sent eleven diplomatic notes to Washington, voicing concern over Mexicans’ treatment by immigration agents, but they had yielded no concrete results. Now she declared, “We cannot allow the mistreatment of our brothers in the United States.” Sheinbaum was treating Salgado’s death as a homicide—in her words, as a “targeted” act of violence. Her government was exploring legal action: Mexican officials were formally requesting that the Department of Justice—and prosecutors’ offices around the country—open criminal investigations into the killings of Mexicans. Cease-and-desist letters were issued to detention centers where Mexican nationals had died.
“This is one of the few moments when Mexico is the one raising the stakes,” Carlos Bravo Regidor, a noted political analyst, told me. “Usually, it’s Mexico working to cool the fires Trump sets.” Sheinbaum has spent months deflecting threats of U.S. military action. Trump has been engaged in a maximum-pressure campaign against drug cartels, which has implicated several officials in Mexico, including members of Morena, Sheinbaum’s party. Sheinbaum has challenged a number of high-profile extradition requests from the U.S., insisting that Mexico’s sovereignty is non-negotiable. Yet her constituents are likely to grow impatient if she stands by her political allies while ignoring the violence targeting Mexicans across the border. “Sheinbaum needs to be seen standing up to Trump—and doing so in a way that goes beyond simply turning narco-politicians into martyrs of national sovereignty,” Bravo Regidor said. “It is a finely calibrated escalation. She must respond to the hostility aimed at Mexicans without letting that response set her on a collision course with Trump.”
The Mexican government has facilitated legal assistance to Salgado’s family and acted as a crucial intermediary. The consulate in Houston arranged for Victor to have a private visitation with his brother’s body, and helped process parole requests for family members in Mexico to attend the funeral. Yet it’s unclear whether Sheinbaum’s government can force legal action against ICE. The Mexican Ambassador, Roberto Lazzeri, met recently with a senior official at the State Department, who handed him back the letters Mexico had filed. The Administration interpreted the missives as an attempt to “direct the actions of U.S. government personnel” on their own soil. Sergio Aguayo, a prominent political scientist, told me, “I don’t think the Mexican government has a clear sense of how far it wants to go, or how it wants to get there. A dance between principle and pragmatism is playing out between the two administrations.”
Not long after Salgado’s death, lawmakers gathered in Houston for a hearing on the case. Teare, who was in attendance, said that his office had heard nothing from the division investigating the incident at D.H.S. The shooter’s identity had not been revealed, and much of the evidence remained in ICE’s hands. Of the eighty-six law-enforcement agencies operating in Harris County, he said, ICE was the only one not to use body cameras. Teare made clear that it was basic police practice not to shoot into a vehicle unless an officer had no other way to protect himself; it was also basic practice not to assign blame in public before conducting a preliminary investigation. As for the three witnesses being held in a detention center, Teare’s access to them had been restricted. “I’ve never seen behavior like this,” he said. (One of the witnesses was later released, although the federal government is fighting to have him returned to detention.)
Donatti, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, said that ICE’s lawlessness wasn’t accidental: “The intention is to terrorize—it’s a signalling mechanism. Does the fact that it is a much more formalized state violence, operating through nominal bureaucratic channels, fundamentally change what it is?” The fear in immigrant communities was evident to everyone in the room. Teare said that fewer victims of domestic violence were coming forward, because they were terrified of law enforcement. Even people who had been robbed or sexually assaulted wouldn’t call the police. A religious leader from Houston said that churchgoers often asked him if it was safe to go to the grocery store, the hospital, or Sunday Mass.
Facing the lawmakers were two of Salgado’s sons. Ronaldo didn’t want his father to be reduced to a “headline of ‘Mexican Man Shot and Killed by ICE.’ ” He wanted the public to know that anyone could be targeted. Ronaldo’s younger brother asked his listeners to imagine the next victim as someone they knew. “Your brother, your father, your cousin, a beloved co-worker,” he said. “Picture that loved one’s face pinned to the ground in pain and yelling out in desperate need of help. Picture the anger and helplessness of watching that person bleed out through a video on your phone. What would you do after?” For the brothers, remembrance was a form of justice. As the investigation ran its course, they enlisted the city’s public library to preserve the items recovered from the site of their father’s memorial. ♦
