ICE Agent Kills Man in Houston; DHS Says It Was Self-Defense

ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on Tuesday and DHS called it self-defense.

This is not an isolated tragedy. This is the operating procedure of an enforcement regime that has fired into civilian vehicles at least a dozen times since last July, leaving at least two people dead in a pattern where the civilians were almost entirely unarmed. The agency has not said where the shooting happened. The Houston Police Department did not return requests for comment. The FBI is “investigating,” which in this case means the FBI referred all questions back to the agency whose officer pulled the trigger.

That is not how investigations work. That is how agencies protect themselves when they do not want the public to know what happened.

We who live in this country have built a machine that turns the natural human instinct to flee into a capital offense, and we who have supported successive administrations of both parties have fed the deportation machine that demands this blood. The machine does not discriminate by party. It operates across every presidential term, turning terror into policy and self-deportation into a goal achieved by fear. We saw the same playbook in the California case — a man shot by ICE who later pleaded not guilty to federal charges, held in custody while the agents who pulled the trigger faced no accountability.

The language of the state insists the vehicle was the weapon. He was handed a training manual in some federal classroom that calls a sedan a weapon and a left turn an attack. He was given a script before he was given a conscience. DHS has already written the statement that explains his shooting before the investigation has begun. The FBI is not investigating. The FBI is taking dictation. The agency has not said where the shooting happened. He was sent into a Mexican-American neighborhood before dawn to do a job the public is not allowed to see clearly after he has done it.

The Book of Leviticus commands, thirty-six times by the rabbis’ count, that the stranger who lives among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. A Mexican man is dead in Houston. The verse was not written for the convenience of the agency. The tradition we claim names the true violence. When the Torah commands you to love the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt, it presumes a memory of terror that the state is now inflicting on others. To read the law as a warrant for slaughter is to invert the very commandment that demands you remember your own deliverance from death.

Pope Francis, on the island of Lampedusa in 2013, said we have fallen into a “globalization of indifference” in which the death of a man in a place we do not know does not reach us. The indifference is in Houston this morning.

Óscar Romero, the night before they killed him, told the soldiers of his own country to stop the repression in the name of God. He did not address the soldiers in the third person. He said you. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to the sky each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: cease the repression.” He was speaking to men with guns in his country. The text has not expired in ours.

I say this to the officer who fired the shot. He is a person and not a monster, and he will carry this night with him for the rest of his life whether or not DHS calls it self-defense. I do not know what was in front of him in that East End street at seven in the morning. I do not know whether the man in the car was trying to kill him, escape him, or panic in a way that looked like the first when it was the second. But I know this: he was handed a script before he was handed a conscience. The institution is reaching for him. He does not have to reach back. He can speak. He can refuse the script. He can still come back from this. Whatever happened in that street, he does not have to be the man whose name is on the statement DHS has already written. I know the union has lawyers on retainer for the morning. I know the law that puts a shield between his trigger finger and a courtroom. I know the office that will investigate him is part of the agency that wrote his statement. But he is a man, and the door is not closed.

I write this as a Mexican-American, the son of El Paso, a man who has lived in neighborhoods where ICE comes before dawn. I have heard my own people say the quiet thing — that they want the laws enforced, that they want the criminals gone, that an officer who fires in self-defense is doing a hard job. I have said some of it myself. I know what the script sounds like in my own mouth, and I know the script sounds the same no matter which party runs the agency. The deportation machine Adam Goodman named is older than any of us, and it is fed by the part of us that wants the streets to feel safe even at the cost of a man in Houston whose name we have to learn.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a man. He had a name. He had people who will bury him this week. The officer who shot him is a man. He has a name. He has a mother, and a wife maybe, and a conscience that will not let him sleep. The agency that sent both of them into that East End street before dawn is not a man, and it does not have a conscience, and it has already written the statement that turns one of these men into a criminal and the other into a hero. Romero stood in the cathedral and said you to the soldiers because he knew the difference between a person and the script a person is handed. The script in this case has been written in Washington. The man it was handed to is in Houston. The man who is dead is in Houston. The parish that will pray for both of them tonight is in Houston.

We have killed a man in Houston. The door of return is open to everyone who had a hand in it. The door of return is not the door of forgetting. It is the door of telling the truth.