ICE Says DPS Gave Them the Tip. DPS Says It Didn’t. Somebody Has a Problem.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was not the man ICE was looking for.
He was a 52-year-old Mexican construction worker who had lived in Texas for more than three decades. He had no criminal record and no prior deportation order. On July 7, he was driving a white work van through Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood with three other Mexican construction workers on their way to work when ICE agents pursued his van. An agent ultimately shot and killed him. (The Texas Tribune)
ICE later acknowledged that Salgado wasn’t its target.
Now we are beginning to learn why ICE was there in the first place.
And the story has become stranger.
ICE Put DPS in Its Own Report
Newly disclosed federal records contain an extraordinarily specific statement.
According to ICE’s own account, agents had “previously received Intel from DPS troopers” about two people associated with a white van with Texas plates. The report says identification information for two subjects was provided and that neither man was the registered owner of the vehicle. (ABC13 Houston)
This isn’t somebody’s recollection six weeks later.
It is contained in an official account written by ICE officers and filed in federal court.
ABC13 reporters went to the federal courthouse Friday and obtained physical copies of the records. (ABC13 Houston)
There is only one problem.
DPS says it isn’t true.
“The document is incorrect,” DPS spokesperson Ericka Miller said.
DPS went further. It said it provided no information of any sort to ICE concerning the location, vehicles, individuals, or Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and told reporters to ask DHS to confirm that the tip did not originate with DPS personnel. (ABC13 Houston)
So we have reached a remarkably simple question:
Who is telling the truth?
And Why Would DPS Be Involved Anyway?
There is another question that shouldn’t be buried.
Public reporting says ICE was originally looking for at least one Guatemalan man with a prior deportation order. That is an immigration matter. Nothing made public so far establishes that the original target was being sought by DPS for committing a Texas crime. (The Texas Tribune)
Yet ICE’s official report says DPS troopers provided the intelligence.
If that’s true, why?
What caused Texas state police to identify these particular men?
What were DPS troopers investigating?
Were the men suspected of committing a state crime?
If not, why was DPS gathering information about them and sending it to federal immigration agents?
Those aren’t accusations. They are questions created by ICE’s own report.
DPS says none of it happened.
Fine.
Then ICE has another question to answer:
Why does an official ICE report say that it did?
Then Came the Wrong White Van
According to the newly disclosed account, federal agents conducted surveillance after receiving the original information. They saw another white work van at the location and obtained only part of its license plate. Weeks later, agents encountered another white van leaving the same general area at approximately the same time in the morning. (Univision)
The report says agents saw a passenger and believed he matched the description of one of the people they were seeking.
That deserves more scrutiny than it has received.
The intended target was reportedly Guatemalan.
Every man in Lorenzo Salgado’s van was of Mexican descent. (The Texas Tribune)
So what exactly constituted the resemblance?
Did agents possess a clear photograph?
Were the men’s facial features distinctive?
Did height and age match?
Did ICE know precisely which license plate it was looking for?
Or had the description become broad enough that Latino men riding in a white work van in Magnolia Park could look sufficiently similar to the targets?
We don’t know.
ICE does.
“Resembled the Target” Isn’t an Answer
That is where the racial-profiling question enters this story.
It cannot yet fairly be stated as fact that agents racially profiled Salgado and his passengers. We don’t know what information the agents possessed or what they saw.
But neither should reporters pretend the question doesn’t exist.
Agents were searching for Latino immigrants in one of Houston’s oldest heavily Latino neighborhoods. They pursued a van occupied entirely by Mexican men because, according to their account, one of those men resembled an immigration target who wasn’t in the vehicle.
Then they discovered they had the wrong people.
One of those wrong people ended up dead.
Resembled him how?
That’s a question ICE should have to answer.
And the Evidence We Would Normally Expect Is Missing
If this had been an ordinary police shooting in Harris County, investigators would normally expect a substantial evidentiary trail.
Here, none of the four ICE agents involved was wearing a body camera. ICE says dash-camera footage isn’t “available.” Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare says his office still hasn’t received the field-operations worksheet explaining ICE’s justification for stopping Salgado’s van, nor ICE’s pursuit and use-of-force policies. (The Texas Tribune)
Teare, who has handled hundreds of officer-involved shootings, says the pursuit and stop were unlike anything he has encountered in normal law-enforcement practice. After examining available video, he said the traffic stop was not initiated correctly and that the positioning of the officers wasn’t consistent with how agencies he knows train officers. (The Texas Tribune)
Eyewitnesses also dispute significant portions of ICE’s story—including whether emergency lights and sirens were being used and whether Salgado tried to run over an agent. (Houston Chronicle)
Now Teare intends to put the case before a Harris County grand jury, partly because a grand jury can subpoena information federal authorities haven’t voluntarily provided. (The Texas Tribune)
Somebody Needs to Explain the Beginning
There has understandably been enormous attention on the final seconds: the vehicles, the alleged collision and the ICE agent firing into Salgado’s van.
But perhaps investigators need to back up.
How did this operation begin?
ICE says DPS supplied intelligence about two men and a white van.
DPS says ICE’s statement is false.
The public record has not identified a Texas crime those original men were suspected of committing.
ICE then mistook another group of Latino men in another white work van for its targets.
And the mistake ended with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead.
There may eventually be an innocent explanation for every step in that chain.
But DPS and ICE should provide those explanations. We shouldn’t manufacture them on their behalf.
Until they do, I suspect most reasonable people looking at these facts are going to think much the way Meme does:
Why was DPS allegedly feeding information about these men to ICE in the first place, what made the wrong Mexican men “resemble” the targets, and why—after a man was killed—can’t the two agencies even agree on who started the whole thing?
Those aren’t conspiracy theories.
Those are the questions their own records created.
