Houston authorities will investigate ICE killing of Mexican immigrant

Hours after three witnesses questioned the official account of how an immigration agent killed a man in Houston this week, city officials said they would begin their own investigation of the federal government’s actions, reported The New York Times.

Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said he, the city’s police department and the district attorney’s office would work aggressively to obtain all evidence and uncover the truth, reversing his earlier position that the city had no jurisdiction over the case.

“We are not settling to wait for an F.B.I. report,” Mr. Whitmire said during a news briefing on Friday afternoon. “We want answers.”

The episode began about 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant, was driving in East Houston on his way to work at a construction site in a van with three other workers. Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement began tailing him.

On Friday, the agency said in a statement that Mr. Araujo had rammed an ICE vehicle, had not followed orders and had tried to run over an officer. An ICE agent fired in self-defense, the statement said. Mr. Araujo was shot in the abdomen and taken to a hospital, where he died.

No evidence was provided to support ICE’s account.

On Friday, the three men with Mr. Araujo said through a lawyer that he had not used his vehicle as a weapon or tried to run over the immigration officers. The men were arrested and provided their version of events to the lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who visited them in immigration detention.

“I have no doubt that what they are saying is the truth,” Mr. Balderas-Ibarra said during a news conference on Friday. “All three reiterated that at no point was an agent standing in front of the vehicle nor was an agent placed in the line of danger.”

Mr. Araujo’s death came as ICE officers are increasing arrests across the United States, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. In five days at the end of June, agents arrested more than 10,000 people, the documents show. From Tuesday through Thursday, ICE officers arrested more than 6,000 people, internal records show.

Previous surges have been accompanied by violence, and video evidence in recent months has disproved federal law enforcement’s accounts of several shootings.

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