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ICE is quieter but still deadly

What we know about the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.

In less than a week, two people have died during encounters with ICE — one in Texas and another in Maine. The incidents have put immigration enforcement back in the headlines and raised new questions about how ICE is carrying out President Donald Trump’s promise of an aggressive immigration crackdown, and what he has called the largest mass deportation effort in American history.

The renewed scrutiny ICE is facing comes during a moment of transition inside the Department of Homeland Security. Under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, immigration enforcement was loud: High-profile raids. Border Patrol agents deployed alongside ICE. Made-for-TV operations that produced dramatic videos, went viral online, and frequently led cable and local news broadcasts. After months of criticism, Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin, who has continued pursuing many of the same immigration goals with a noticeably quieter public profile.

The killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston has become one of the first major tests of DHS’s quieter and more professional approach. Following the second fatal shooting in Maine, ICE announced Tuesday it was putting a halt to its practice of traffic stops. But the Houston killing remains a revealing flashpoint,

Houston Public Media reporter Bianca Seward has been covering the shooting from the beginning. She told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that her reporting has continued to evolve over the past week as witnesses have come forward, competing accounts of the shooting have emerged, and local officials have clamored for the opportunity to conduct their own investigation.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

So let’s just go back to where this whole thing started, which I believe is almost a week ago, Tuesday morning, July 7. What happened on Tuesday to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo?

Yeah. Well, we’ve learned a lot over the last week as to what exactly happened Tuesday morning and there’s still a lot of outstanding questions, but I can take you back to Tuesday afternoon when the first time we heard about the shooting. We had a very small statement from ICE just kind of detailing their very short account of what happened. And according to an ICE spokesperson, they were attempting to do a targeted enforcement operation, arrest Salgado Araujo, and they say during that traffic stop, during that moment, during that encounter, they claim that Salgado Araujo was weaponizing his vehicle, attempting to evade arrest, attempting to ram an ICE officer with his car when the officer fired his gun. He was shot in the abdomen and then taken to Ben Taub Hospital, a hospital here in Houston, where he later died of his wounds. But it wasn’t........

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