Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents pursued and murdered another innocent person on Tuesday, July 7, 2026. The killing occurred in Houston, Texas. ICE admitted that the man they shot, Lorenzo Salgado Aruajo, was not the person they were looking for.
ICE agents currently are working under a quota of 2,000 arrests per day, double what it was earlier this year. The Harris County (TX) Medical Examiner has officially ruled Mr. Aruajo’s death a homicide, saying he died from a “penetrating gunshot wound of the torso.”
Mr. Aruajo was a 52 year old immigrant from Mexico who had no criminal record, had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and had three sons, all U.S. citizens. The eldest son is a teacher, one is an engineer and the third is studying engineering in college. Mr. Aruajo owned a construction company, had applied for a work permit, submitted his fingerprints to the federal government for it and was very close to obtaining legal status. Mr. Aruajo had had just picked up three of his workers, stopped to get water and ice and was on his way to work just before 7:00 a.m. when ICE agents pursued him in his white work van and shot him in the abdomen through the passenger side window. The ICE vehicles were unmarked and had nothing on them to indicate they were law enforcement until switching on police lights near the end of the encounter. The ICE agents were not wearing any body cameras, and had no video cameras in their vehicles.
The Department of Homeland Security told the same false story about Mr. Aruajo’s killing that they have told about other murders ICE agents have committed, like those of Renee Good, Marimar Martinez and Alex Pretti. In a tweet, DHS claimed Mr. Aruajo had “attempted to evade arrest,” “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.”
All three workers in the van who witnessed the killing of Mr. Aruajo strongly refute DHS’s claim that he weaponized his vehicle and tried to run over an ICE agent. One witness, Jose Trinidad Rojas, made a written account of the killing in which he said DHS’s claim that Mr. Aruajo tried to run over an officer is a “lie,” because there were never any officers in front of or behind the vehicle. Mr. Rojas said the agents were positioned on the sides of the vehicle. All three witnesses who dispute DHS’s account of the killing tell the same story of how it happened: They say an unmarked vehicle abruptly cut their vehicle off in the middle of an intersection, that Mr. Araujo then made a U-turn and proceeded slowly down the street and the ICE vehicles then rammed their vehicle. They say Mr. Aruajo had brought the van to a complete stop and put it in park when an ICE agent shot him in the abdomen through the passenger side window.
DHS is now holding all three witnesses in immigration detention facilities and they are facing deportation, and situation that could make it impossible for them to testify about what happened in a court of law.
As with the Alex Pretti and Renee Good murders in Minnesota, DHS is shutting local law enforcement agencies out of the investigation and instead of focusing on the unjust murder, is focusing on the claim that Mr. Aruajo assaulted a federal officer. Houston Mayor John Whitmire said federal officers are “tightly controlling” evidence in the case, that the feds control “the scene, the deceased, the van, the witnesses,” in short, everything pertinent to the investigaiton.
ICE has shot at least 21 people since last year, many in their vehicles. Five people have died, including three American citizens.
Videos of the pursuit and aftermath of the shooting by NBC News: