A man who was fatally shot by immigration agents at a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday was not the intended target, US officials say.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national, was stopped at 07:00 local time (12:00GMT) while driving to work and was killed shortly afterwards.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday the stop was initiated because they saw “a white van with an individual who resembled the target” of an operation. They have claimed the officer shot in self-defence.
The agents involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras and officials have not released any images or videos related to it.
A DHS spokesperson said in a statement to the BBC’s US partner, CBS News that half its field officers are now equipped with body cameras and the other half are expected to receive them in the next 60 days.
Salgado, 52, had been working as a builder for three decades in the Houston area after coming to the US as an undocumented migrant, his family said.
They said he had no criminal record and was close to obtaining a work permit. He was driving himself and three co-workers to a site when the incident took place, they added.
In an earlier statement on Tuesday, DHS, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said agents had “attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien”.
It alleged Salgado “attempted to evade arrest” and rammed an ICE vehicle and the officer “fired his weapon in self-defence”.
He was taken to hospital, where he died of his injuries, the statement said.
On Thursday, DHS said agents had seen two white vans weeks prior to the incident at an address they had surveilled. When they returned on Tuesday, they saw “a white van with an individual who resembled the target” and initiated the traffic stop.
The incident prompted protests in Houston on Wednesday, and four Democratic Congress members have demanded an independent investigation into Salgado’s death.
In a letter to DHS, Representatives Sylvia Garcia, Al Green, Lizzie Fletcher and Christian Menefeewrote, wrote that the incident was “not the first time ICE agents have used unnecessary, deadly force”.
They urged Senator Markwayne Mullin, head of the Department of Homeland Security, to not forget the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two US citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.
Referring to Salgado’s shooting on Tuesday, they wrote that “instead of answers and accountability, DHS and ICE released a statement echoing the same stories we have heard before, claiming an evasion of arrest, weaponisation of a vehicle, and that the fatal shooting was a result of self-defense”.
In the wake of the shooting, the Mexican government said it would file criminal complaints in the US over the deaths of more than a dozen of its citizens in US custody.
Mexican Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said 14 Mexicans had died while in ICE custody and another three during ICE “arrest operations”.
Velasco said that he had been instructed by Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum to file the complaints and that their aim was to have the deaths of Mexicans in ICE custody or operations investigated “as criminal matters”.
By BBC News
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