On Friday, President Donald Trump's newly appointed far-right U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Aaron Reitz, issued a statement about the fatal shooting of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston. The statement did its best to absolve the officers of any wrongdoing and emphasized that Salgado is an "illegal alien" despite him not even being the suspect ICE agents were looking for during the incident.
However, some legal experts noticed that a specific passage of the statement appeared to directly indicate ICE officers lied about a critical detail.
From the start, ICE has claimed that Salgado tried to run down agents with his vehicle. But that doesn't line up with the details Reitz gave in his statement.
"At some point, two of the four officers got out of their vehicles and instructed the non-compliant aliens to put the van in park," Reitz said. "Preliminary information indicates the driver shifted the van into reverse, then forward again, while an officer was partially inside the van or immediately next to it. During this confrontation between federal agents and a group of illegal aliens attempting to flee, one of the officers fired a single shot," which struck Salgado, later killing him despite officers administering aid.
If these details are correct, David Bier of the Cato Institute pointed out on X that he couldn't have been running down anyone.
"This statement admits DHS lied," wrote Bier. "There is nothing about weaponizing the vehicle or attempting to run over the officer. He says the agent was "'inside the van or immediately next to it.' OK, he was not 'inside the van,' so he just gunned him down from the side of the van."
In other words, per American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, "ICE admits now that the *best case* scenario is that the ICE officer who shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in the chest ran up to a moving vehicle and shoved his arms into the passenger window and opened fired seconds later. No vehicle 'weaponization'; no effort to run anyone down."
