The US state of Texas will investigate the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo last week by federal immigration agents, Governor Greg Abbott has announced, as demands for answers grow.
The Texas Rangers, a state law enforcement agency, will work alongside federal officials “to get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” Abbott told reporters on Wednesday.
“Immigration laws can be enforced, and stopping illegal immigration from coming across our border can be achieved, without shooting people,” Abbott said.
After Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot Salgado Araujo, the federal government said it would investigate the incident, but locals called for an independent probe.
ICE agents had stopped Salgado Araujo on the morning of 7 July while he was driving to work. He was taken to a local hospital, where he later died.
Details remain scarce and video of the shooting itself has not yet emerged. ICE did not wear body cameras during the operation, according to Congresswoman Silvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents the area.
ICE initially alleged Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle”, and an officer opened fire in self defence.
The Department of Homeland Security later said Salgado Araujo was not the target of the operation and ICE initiated the traffic stop after seeing “a white van with an individual who resembled the target”.
Salgado Araujo’s family has disputed the government’s account of the incident.
In other shootings tied to President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration – such as those that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year – video footage and eyewitness testimony have contradicted ICE’s statements.
In an application for a warrant to search the vehicle after the incident, which a judge granted, an FBI agent said he saw several plastic bags “with what appeared to be a white crystal-like substance packaged in small plastic bags”, which they believed were consistent with methamphetamine.
But a lawyer for the victim’s brother, Victor Salgado Araujo, who was also in the car at the time of the shooting, said that the substance was actually salt.
“After consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this was granulated salt, which is paired with lemon and water as a homemade electrolyte mix used by outdoor workers in extreme Texas heat, not methamphetamine or any other illicit substance,” the attorney Ruby Powers said in a statement to the BBC.
Powers has called for the FBI to expedite the testing of the substance.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told CNN on Thursday that his team also did not believe the packages contained drugs and he believed the substance would be tested by the FBI “either today or in the next few days.”
Salgado Araujo, 52, was a father of three who had lived in the United States for about 35 years and was working to obtain legal residency, according to his family.
One of his sons, Ronaldo Salgado, told reporters that he learned his father was shot from video of the aftermath circulating on social media.
“I recognised him immediately, not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street,” said Salgado.
He then learned his father died from news reports.
Salgado told reporters that three men, including his uncle, were with his father at the time of the shooting and taken into immigration detention after the incident.
The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, an internal watchdog, is investigating the shooting death, and the FBI in Houston is leading an investigation into the potential assault on a federal law enforcement officer, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to the BBC last week.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire called for an independent investigation into the incident and, at his direction, the Houston Police Department requested that the Texas Rangers open one.
Days after Salgado Araujo’s death, ICE agents in Maine fatally shot another man, 26-year-old Colombian man named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, sparking protests in the state.
The back-to-back shootings reignited a debate about ICE’s use of force in arresting and detaining people believed to be in the country illegally.
Trump on Tuesday said ICE would continue to make traffic stops – one of its top tools in carrying out immigration enforcement – after his border tsar Tom Homan suggested the stops would be temporarily suspended following the shootings.
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