The Department of Homeland Security’s description of events surrounding a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer-involved fatal shooting of a Mexican man in Houston has come under scrutiny as new details about the encounter have emerged.
An ICE officer shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while federal police were conducting an immigration enforcement operation in the eastern Texas city on Tuesday, the DHS confirmed Tuesday evening in a post on X. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and ICE have not issued statements since then.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner Friday morning, a DHS official said federal law enforcement officers had reason to believe the individual they were looking for would be in a white van, based on intelligence that police had gathered weeks earlier. The statement confirms that federal police were not sure that Salgado Araujo was the person they were searching for at the time of the shooting.
“After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address. Weeks prior to the incident, they noted two white vans at the property,” a DHS official wrote in an email. “On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop.”
But it’s unclear who ICE officers were looking for when they encountered Salgado Araujo or why the DHS implied in its initial statement that he was ICE’s target. The New York Times reported on Friday that Salgado Araujo was not the illegal immigrant ICE officers intended to arrest.
The new statement from the DHS also does not comment on the department’s initial claim Tuesday evening that the officer who shot Salgado Araujo acted in self-defense, a claim that witnesses have since disputed.
“On July 7, 2026, at approximately 6:50 AM CT, ICE law enforcement attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien. The driver of the vehicle, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo—an illegal alien from Mexico—attempted to evade arrest,” the DHS wrote in a post to X on Tuesday evening.
The DHS cited “information we are receiving” that Salgado Araujo “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.”
“The driver was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted,” DHS wrote on Tuesday. “The driver was transported to the hospital where he passed away from his injuries.”
Three men who were detained by police during the incident told attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra that the DHS’s claims were false, however.
“At no point did they use the van to ram into the ICE agents, and at no point were these ICE agents’ lives ever in any danger,” Balderas-Ibarra said in a video posted to Instagram late Thursday.
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Officers on the scene were not wearing body cameras, further complicating the government’s efforts to defend the officer, particularly as Salgado Araujo’s lawyer has called the government’s account into question.
The FBI is the lead investigator into the shooting.