ICE Ramps Back Up, With Deadly Results

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Rachel Abrams** (0:29)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. Two fatal shootings by federal immigration agents in Texas and in Maine have once again put a spotlight on the Trump administration's deportation tactics. Today, my colleague Hamed Aleaziz explains how these killings signal a return to a more aggressive form of immigration enforcement, one that can easily turn a routine moment like a traffic stop into a deadly confrontation.
It's Thursday, July 16th.
Hamed, in the six months since two Americans were killed by federal agents in Minnesota, the government's deportation crackdown has felt a little bit quieter. Federal agents, of course, withdrew from cities. The protests that we saw after Minnesota really died down. We stopped seeing these gruesome confrontations between law enforcement and civilians that people had been capturing on video. And so all of this put together, I think, made these two recent shootings in Houston and then in Maine feel, at least to some people, like they almost came out of nowhere.

**Hamed Aleaziz** (1:55)
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair assessment as far as the public's view because in the months after Minneapolis, arrest numbers dropped pretty dramatically across the country. But that kind of came to an end in late June when suddenly, at least at ICE, there was this sense that the White House wanted more arrests, that the enforcement, it needed to go up dramatically.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:19)
Okay, we're going to talk about what has led to all of that, but I just want to talk about the two shootings first. We are still learning the details of what happened both in Maine and in Houston. But can you just tell us, Hamed, what do we know so far about both of those incidents?

**Hamed Aleaziz** (2:33)
Yes, the first shooting was on July 7th in Houston. In that incident, ICE was looking for two individuals, that they wanted to come and arrest.
As they're doing that surveillance, as they're looking for those two individuals, they come across a van to them that seemed suspicious. And in fact, inside this van, they believe an individual in the car resembled one of the targets that they were looking for. And so they start to look up the license plate information of this van, and they find that it's registered to somebody who is undocumented. And so they decide to go after the car.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:13)
They're basically thinking, oh, even if it's not the people we're looking for, maybe we could pick up another person who's here legally.

**Hamed Aleaziz** (3:20)
Yeah, essentially, I mean, you're at a point now that you have created this level of reasonable suspicion that ICE officers need to pursue individuals. And it's at this point really during this attempt to stop this van where the narratives really start to diverge, where the passengers and the witnesses in this van say that the van was not doing anything dangerous, and where ICE says the van was actually putting their officers in danger, that it was being weaponized, that the officers essentially feared for their safety and needed to use that lethal force.
So that's at this point we know, but we don't have a clear video of this incident.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:06)
But we do know, of course, that they shot into the vehicle killing this person in Houston. So what do we know about the victim at this point?

**Hamed Aleaziz** (4:13)
Yeah, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
He lived in the country for more than 30 years. He's undocumented. And he actually had his own construction crew. His brother was part of it. His brother was in the van. And this story took off for many reasons. But one of them was really this impassioned speech from his son, Ronaldo.

**Ronaldo Salgado Araujo** (4:38)
He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people.

**Hamed Aleaziz** (4:44)
Who just really spoke glowingly about his father.

**Ronaldo Salgado Araujo** (4:47)
I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately.
Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.

**Hamed Aleaziz** (5:04)
You could see in his tears how saddened he was about what had happened to him and something that they never expected.