No Body Cameras, No Dash Cams: Rep. Sylvia Garcia Says ICE Confirmed Gaps in Houston Shooting Evidence

Since Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on Tuesday, July 7, in Houston's Magnolia Park neighborhood, the dispute has shifted from competing accounts to a harder question: is there any hard evidence at all?

U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, said Friday she spoke directly with ICE acting director Todd Lyons and confirmed the agents involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras and their vehicles had no dash cams, according to The Guardian. That means there is no video from ICE's own equipment to check either version of what happened.

That gap matters because ICE's account and the witnesses' account do not just differ on interpretation. They flatly contradict each other on where officers were standing.

Two irreconcilable stories

DHS said in a statement Salgado Araujo "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer," prompting the agent to fire in self-defense. A DHS spokesperson added this week that "dangerous criminals, whether they be illegal aliens or US citizens, are assaulting law enforcement and turning their vehicles into weapons to attack law enforcement."

Three men who were passengers in the van, interviewed separately by immigration attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra at a detention center, said that account is false. "My clients reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger," Balderas-Ibarra said at a Friday news conference, according to the Texas Tribune.

One of the men, Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, put it bluntly in a handwritten statement shared with The Washington Post: "That is a lie. It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over ... there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides."

Salgado Araujo had lived in the U.S. for nearly 35 years and had no criminal record, according to The Guardian. He was driving construction workers, including his brother, to a job site when agents approached.

Witnesses facing deportation

The League of United Latin American Citizens says DHS moved to deport the eyewitnesses who dispute the agency's version of events, according to the Davis Vanguard. State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Pasadena, raised the obvious question at a press event: "If these ICE agents have nothing to hide, then why try to deport people with information?"

DHS has not publicly explained why the men were being processed for removal while they are simultaneously the only living witnesses to a federal use-of-force incident. Pérez is now demanding preservation of all evidence tied to the shooting and has called for criminal charges against the agents involved. Those are her demands, not findings, and no charges have been filed against anyone as of this writing.

The case for ICE's side

Agents conducting enforcement stops do face real risk from vehicles, and split-second decisions in that setting are genuinely hard to second-guess after the fact. DHS's broader argument, that vehicles have been used as weapons against agents in other incidents, is not fabricated out of thin air. Assaults on law enforcement during enforcement operations do happen. The absence of body cameras is a policy failure, not automatically proof of a cover-up.

But that same absence of cameras is exactly why this case can't currently be resolved by evidence. ICE's word stands against five eyewitnesses, all of whom are now facing deportation. A federal agency's internal account, made without recording equipment and involving witnesses it is trying to remove from the country, is not something that can simply be taken at face value or dismissed outright.

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has opened an investigation into the shooting, and Garcia, Balderas-Ibarra and Teare all said Friday that an outside law enforcement agency, separate from ICE, needs to review the case. Salgado Araujo is the 10th person killed by immigration agents nationally since President Trump's second term began in January 2025, according to an analysis by The Guardian cited by Pérez. The Texas Tribune separately found at least 14 people have died in federal detention centers in Texas alone since January 2025. Whether Teare's office gains access to the three detained witnesses, and whether they remain in the country long enough to testify, is the open question hanging over the case.