Today, Explained - ICE kills again

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

The new guy overseeing ICE was supposed to dial back the shock and awe. But in Houston, another person was just shot and killed by an ICE agent. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. A portrait of Lorenzo Salgado is seen at a memorial where he was killed by an ICE agent, during a protest in Houston, Texas. Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When they write the history books about Trump to Trump harder, I imagine they'll have to dedicate an entire chapter to Minneapolis. Homeland Security called ICE's Operation Metro Surge, the biggest immigration enforcement operation in the department's history. Protesters called it fascism. Two Americans were killed by ICE, and the backlash went nationwide. The Trump administration had to call off the operation.

The guy in charge of it lost his job, Eventually the head of Homeland Security lost her job. There's maybe no better example of the Trump administration making a major course correction. But it's been over six months since that mess and ice is back. It's quiet now. There's less shock and awe. But there's a new boss and deportations are up and the killings are back too. We had one last week in Texas and one just this morning in Maine.

So we're going to talk about a second ice age on today's explain from Vox. This is Today Explained. Today explained, Sean Ramos from the thing about these ice killings is that time and again, you get the ice version of events and then eventually you get another version that hues closer to the truth. Someone died in Maine this morning and the details are still forthcoming. But we have more to say about the shooting one week ago in Houston, Texas. So we asked Houston Public Radio's Bianca Seward on the show to tell us what we know so far. Yeah, well, we've learned a lot over the last week as to what exactly how. on Tuesday morning, and there's still a lot of outstanding questions. But I can take you back to

Tuesday afternoon when the first time we heard about the shooting. We had a very small statement from ICE just kind of detailing their very short account of what happened. And according to an ICE spokesperson, they were attempting to do a targeted enforcement operation, arrest Salgado Arauj. And they say during that traffic stop during that moment, during that encounter, they claim that Salgado Arauj was weaponizing his vehicle, attempting to evade a rest, attempting to ram a nice officer with his car when the officer fired his gun. He was shot in the abdomen and then taken to Bentob Hospital, a hospital here in Houston, where he later died of his wounds. But it wasn't until the early afternoon when we, when we the public and reporters began to hear about what had happened. And at that moment,

we had very little to go off of. Did people initially take that account as the, you know, unimpeachable truth, or was there immediately suspicions that there may have been another side of the story? It was almost immediate that immigrant rights organizations like Lulag and the family were disputing the account. We do not believe them. They're playing by a playbook. They're using a template in shootings and murders that have happened across the country time and time again, and it is time to stop. We don't expect the truth from the Department of Justice or from the FBI. We expect a whitewash. Mostly, we just didn't have a lot to go off of. We had the very short statement from ICE,

and we had almost no details from the family. The family themselves were looking for more answers. It took them a while to figure out what had happened to their father when he had passed. Around 7 a.m., I was notified by my mom that something bad had happened to my dad. We didn't know what. All we knew is that it was ICE related. I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognize him immediately.

Not from his appearance, but from his voice. Crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out. So a lot of outstanding questions Tuesday night, and the calls for accountability, transparency began immediately. So how long does it take until we get a differing account of what happened on Tuesday morning? The next morning we started to hear from the family. Two of Salgado-Warrajo's sons, Rinaldo and Lorenzo Jr., spoke to the public and started to offer just details about who their father was and that they believed their father would have complied that he was trying to just go to work. And they didn't believe that their father would be acting aggressively, ramming his car, or attempting to evade arrest. They said it didn't sound like his father. But it would take a few more days before we got any more credible accounts about people who were in the car with Salgado Aroujo. And when did that happen and what did they say? On Thursday, we started to see reports online that the detainees, the men who were in Salgado Rajo's car, who were also detained by ICE, started to kind of come out through their lawyers, speak out about their experience.

On Friday, the lawyer for two of the men who were detained, Hugo Balderas, said that... I can tell you with conviction that my client's versions of the events are extremely different from what ICE agents are saying or what the agency is saying. Essentially, they were saying that at no time was there an ICE agent in front of the car, that he came the approach to the side of the car, that the shots fired from the side of the car, basically discredited in the idea that Salgado O'Rajou was ramming his car with an officer or was ever trying to run an officer over. They alleged that the account happened completely from the side and that the officer fired immediately upon exiting his vehicle. How does the city respond to this differing account?

Yeah, there's been a lot of calls for Houston Police Department to do an independent investigation for anybody on the Houston official level to launch an investigation. And it's kind of unfolded over the week in a bit of a confusing manner, I think, for the public. District attorney, Shantir, did say on our radio that... My office is running an investigation. But we do not have the same level of access that we do in almost any other officer-involved shooting. We ourselves have seen people from the district attorney's office going to different gas stations in the area and other businesses to ask for surveillance footage. But the problem that Tier is outlining is that they haven't been invited by the federal

authorities to collaborate or work alongside them. So Tier is clear that he may not be privy to all of the evidence that federal authorities do collect during their own investigation. Right now, the Federal Bureau of Investigations is the one leading the inquiry, but their investigation is clearly into the potential assault on a law enforcement. It doesn't say that it's into the shooting as a whole to find exactly what happened. And how is ICE, responding to this account that disputes theirs? We've asked repeatedly about allegations that their account is not fully accurate or that it's missing details or that it implies that Salgado Arajo was behaving in a way that he might not have

been, and we've gotten no answers. We haven't got any kind of comment about the allegations that the account is not credible or if they want to add any more to their initial statement. So how are we going to find out the truth if we are at all? It's going to be a difficult process, and part of the thing that complicates that is that ICE and DHS has said that the officers on the scene were not wearing any body cameras, and they had no dash cam video of the incident. So they're saying that the ICE agents on the ground have no video to share with the public. We are starting to see clips on social media from those surveillance videos, from the footage at gas stations or from witnesses who were filming as well, start to circulate online that show different parts of the shooting and different parts of the encounter, but we're still not getting the. most full, clear picture yet. Hmm. Could you tell us about this individual, Lorenzo Salgado Rajo? Who was he?

Yeah, from what we've learned from his sons, he got to Houston in the early 90s and has been here since working as in construction, helping build homes in the Houston area. They said, you know, he would go to work all day, come home and be with his family. My father was a simple man, a family man, a man, a man of routine. He dedicated his life in the United States. to giving his family the American dream. My father was a private man, a man who dedicated his life to work.

You can find him every evening after work, resting on his porch, listening to music, petting his dog. You know, he's the father of three sons, all of whom have gone on to college and are now working in teaching professions or as engineers,

and they describe him as a shy man, a man who loved his family, a man who cared for his sons, a man who loved the Chivas soccer team from Mexico, you know, someone that they're deeply miss. And was he undocumented? Did he have warrants out for his arrest or anything of that sort? As far as we can tell, we've done our searches within Harris County and in other databases that we found no criminal record so far.

And the sons also say that there was no criminal record for him, that he hadn't had any issues with the law. He was undocumented. But the sons shared with us last week that he was working to obtain a work permit. So could have been on the path. His sons were all born here in the United States, so are themselves citizens. And I think the family was starting to look at ways to legitimize their status here. And was ICE after him on Tuesday morning, or was this like a case of mistaken identity or what? Well, no.

Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that Salgado Arrajo was not the intended target of their investigation. They did say that they were targeting another man and Salgado O'Rajo was picking up men on his way to work. So DHS spokesperson has said that they were targeting another man that they believe got into the van with Salgado O'Arajo. It's not clear if they were correct. If the man that they were targeting was the man that got in the van, they have confirmed that Salgado O'Rajjo was not the intended target, that his brother who was in the car was not the intended target. But they haven't come out and said that, yes, it was one of the other men who had final removal orders or had an administrative warrant out for his arrest. They just say that they were targeting an individual and they believe he got in the car with Salgado O'Rajo, which is what prompted there. Chase. Hmm.

Houston, obviously, is not Minneapolis, but there are some similarities between what happened here. And, I mean, most obviously, I think, what happened to Renee Good in Minneapolis, if you think about someone behind a car and ICE's account, which says that, you know, an agent was at risk from someone behind the wheel of a vehicle. How is Houston responding? Yeah, there's been protests and there's been vigils this week. I said to do. People are here to work. Families are dying. People are dying. What are they doing? Murdering, innocent Mexican people. They come to work. They come here to work. So what if they don't got papers? So what?

And yeah, they're kind of latching onto that confusion, too, the similarities of the narratives, not only with Renee Good being accused of ramming her vehicle into an ICE officer agent. And later the video showing that that was not necessarily the case. But it's also happened here in Texas in South Padre Island, just way south in the Rio Grande Valley. A year ago, another man was accused of ramming an ICE officer. And the video didn't really conclude that to be the case. So this is a narrative that Houstonians have heard before. And immigrant rights off, it's case the organizations immediately find suspicious. That's what they've said. They don't have trust in the organization. They don't have trust in the narrative.

And they want more transparency. They want accountability. They want to know what happened as best as they can recount. Do you see any signs that, The death of Lorenzo Salgado-Rajo might lead to changes in how ICE is operating in Houston? It'll be hard to tell. This is an organization that's been really emboldened by the Trump administration, so it'll be hard to see if there will be motivation to change practices.

One thing that we did learn is that Representative Sylvia Garcia said she spoke with Acting Ice Director David Venturella, who specifically about the lack of body cameras on these agents. He promised her that all agents in the field would have body cameras by the end of the month. DHS spokesperson later clarified it would be within 60 days. So that may be a change that we see coming on the horizon. When we asked DHS about why the agents weren't wearing body cameras, they blamed the, quote, democratic government shutdown. They said it takes time and money to outfit these agents.

And because of the government shutdowns, they were held up in distributing the cameras. We're going to talk about the surge in ICE activity and the new guy in charge of the agency when we're back on. today explained. Support for the show today comes from Built. There's no way around it. Housing is expensive rent mortgage. It doesn't matter which one you're paying. Built was created to help ease the sting. Built started out rewarding members on their rent. That's what they were known for. But now, in 2026, this current year, it's not just for renters. Built members can now earn points on mortgage payments wherever they live. Every housing payment earns you points you can use toward flights

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My name is Eric Bazzali-Miel, and I'm a national security reporter at Politico who covers the Department of Homeland Security. Eric, you and your colleagues recently reported on Mark Wayne Mullen's first few months leading the Department of Homeland Security. How has he changed this department, if he has at all? The biggest change has been optically, right? We're not seeing less enforcement. In fact, we are still seeing, you know,

the Department of Homeland Security carry out the president's ambitious immigration crackdown. ICE is intensifying operations across the country. Sources telling NBC News almost 10,000 people have been arrested in just five days. You're going to see this arrest numbers climb because we've got to arrest these people. We can't wait from to commit another crime to find them.

We've got to find the criminals and the non-criminals, and that's exactly what we're doing. optically, perceptively, it is a significantly more discreet and professionalized operation. They're not focusing on the shock and awe tactics that were really common under Secretary Kristinaum and the deputies that she had elevated within the department. Oh my God. ISIS is here at the car wash. Like they're animals. They're human beings. Oh, my door. Policea. It was an early morning shock outside Sabrina Medina's front door.

Video captured by Medina and neighbors shows a large number of ICE agents, accompanied by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Christine Ome. You're seeing grandmonds, you're seeing children, you're seeing families, you're seeing business owners, you're seeing people who are just standing in line waiting to go to work, being snatched out of those lines, hauled off by men in masks, never to be heard from again, presumably. Arrest as many people that touch you as you want. Gas on bill! Gas on bill! Instead, we've seen an emphasis of the arrest when people are already in local or state custody. That's governed by something called a 287G agreement, which allows ICE to cooperate with those jurisdictions and pick people up who are on unrelated crimes that may have a final order of removal. We're just not seeing as many of those incidents where we see a band of ICE agents go surrounding a car and pulling people out.

And we're not seeing surges of immigration officers into major U.S. cities that are in the eyes of the Trump. administration not doing enough to collaborate with federal law enforcement and with federal immigration officers. So that change has meant that even though the numbers are still high, they're still deporting and detaining thousands of people, you know, throughout the courses of weeks, right? Like, we're not seeing that register in the same visceral way that it did under Kristineh in such a way that it actually really tainted the Trump administration standing with voters on immigration. Why were we ever seeing that? Did Christy Noem have some sort of mandatum? from the president to make this look as horrendous as it looked?

There's a couple things that were going on there. There was a school of thinking that is especially championed by immigration hardliners, really like the toughest hawks on immigration enforcement. That the only way you deter people from coming to the United States is not just to shut down the border, but to make it difficult to live in the United States and to create a culture of fear that you could be rounded up and deported and separated from your family, these shock and awe tactics, in at least some vein, were intended as a deterrent. We will hunt you down.

If you come to this country, you will not get the chance to return. And Noem's decisions, elevating Gregory Brevino, who was a pretty, like, random off border patrol commander to be essentially the point person for how deportation operations were taking place was a sign that she believed that that message was important. We're going to turn and burn to that next target and the next and the next and the next and the next and we're not going to stop. There's also the factor that we can't separate with Kristy Noem is that she had higher political ambitions. And clearly her messaging strategy was not about the department, but a lot of it was about her. The advertising campaign that had her at Mount Rushmore. You cross the border illegally. We'll find you. Her standing with a big cowboy hat at the border.

What is she hiding her face like her ice agents now? By the way, is this what the $800 billion went to? Every day we see her after there's some new tragedy in homeland. She's wearing a different outfit with a different hat. Those photo optics also fit into this idea. She was the face and the implementer of this immigration crackdown. And so that public strategy also played in to the secretary's personal ambitions at the time. Mark Wayne Mullen just isn't that kind of guy.

He doesn't need that kind of optical performance to have a good relationship with Trump. Their relationship goes back to, and Mullen talked about this in his confirmation hearing, to when his son had a traumatic brain injury when Trump was president at the first time, and Mullen at the time was a House member. The president found out about it, and he gave me. a call immediately, and the president didn't understand the severity of it, but he heard it in my voice and immediately he went to work. I told him we had to get to Bakersfield, California, to the center for neural skills, and the president offered us in his plane, his personal plane. So they have a long-standing

relationship. Mullen's also a man, which, as we've seen with the cabinet firings recently, like, if you're a woman, your position is potentially more precarious in the cabinet, and that certainly plays a role in those discussions. And so it's also just a question, too, of who was leading the department and the tone they were trying to set. So we're not seeing the opposite. So we're not seeing the operation metro surge style tactics that were toxic for this administration earlier this year and got a reaction all over the country, if not the world. What are you seeing? You're paying much closer attention to this than maybe the average American is,

and this isn't headline news every day anymore. There are still operations in the field, right? It's not like ICE isn't carrying out some arrests at homes or workplaces. Like, that does still happen. But it's just not in the same scale that it was before. It's usually very targeted. It's for specific types of people that they may have missed like an immigration court hearing and they were wanted on a final order of removal.

They'll arrest that person, bring them to the county jail, and they call ICE. And they say, hey, this person who you have an order of removal against is in our custody. Come pick him up. And so the ICE officer will come to the jail. They only need one person to do it. He's already in handcuffs. They put him in the back of the car and they send him to an ICE detention facility. And that has actually really helped to run up.

the numbers still because it's a low-hanging fruit that wasn't being prioritized in a lot of cases. And the administration has also given local jurisdictions considerable carrots to actually sign these agreements to foster this cooperation. And now they're really maximizing the fruits of those agreements. So tell us what the numbers look like. Are the numbers up? Are they down? Are they about the same? They still haven't met the million a year target that the White House has set. But based on the numbers that we've gotten, it's well over in the hundreds of thousands that they've deported thus far. And the scale that we've heard from our sources that other

outlets have reported is that the number of arrests are in the thousands per day. Certainly in the thousands per week, depending on the scale of operations and where specifically there are targets to be found. But we are getting to a pretty voluminous flow of immigration enforcement that we weren't even seeing

at some of the high points of when Noem was Secretary. Two Americans were killed in Minneapolis when Christy Noem was secretary. I believe many more died in ICE custody. but President Trump had to take the temperature down. Now we've got new leadership, but someone was shot and killed in Texas last week

and reportedly again this morning in Maine. Does that suggest that it's impossible for ICE to fulfill its mission without killing people? Is this type of law enforcement, like, invariably lethal? It's a real challenge to the thesis that we have just spent the last 10 minutes talking about, right? because, I mean, certainly it's a question of the messaging, right, and how do they keep this situation from devolving into protests

or in general from, like, engendering mistrust. And we certainly have to, like, think about, you know, what's the profile of the victim? We're still learning in real time about what happened in Maine. We don't know what the demographic background of the person is, where were the details of the situation that then led to the use of lethal force. That's going to trickle in probably in the next couple days. But there's certainly disparities, right, that we have to acknowledge.

Like, there may be a situation, right, where this doesn't register in the same wave of voters, if there's not video or we're not talking about two white Americans who are American citizens and who have, you know, it's easy to construct a narrative around that they were perfect victims or they were, you know, they were not necessarily the type of people that we voters expect ICE to be going after. But when we still talk about the systematic use of force by ICE, right, irrespective of how this changes the political conversation, It does make it harder for, you know, the Mullen team to argue that there isn't, you know, a structural problem or a systemic problem with the way that ICE has been trained.

And this may reignite a conversation on Capitol Hill about whether there need to be additional guardrails put in. You know, Congress is negotiating an appropriations bill right now that would, you know, even though they've given ICE money through the reconciliation bill, there's still debate about whether they can put provisions in there to constrain ICE behaviors or to require more training or disqualifying. to, you know, if there is going to be any, like, you know, funding that is just pegged to the next federal fiscal year, like, what restrictions are on that money, you know, we may find ourselves having the same conversation that we were having in Washington around the use of force and ISIS training that followed after the two shootings in Minneapolis. And then all the legislative debate is going to get subsumed again by this question of, is ICE acting within appropriate constraints?

You can read Eric Bezali-Meel at Politico.com. You also heard from Bianca Seward from Houston Public Media. You can find and support her work at Houstonpublicmedia.org. Hanyam-Wa-Woddy produced the show today. Jolie Myers edited. Gabriel Donatov, check the facts. David Tadishore and Patrick Boyd mixed

for today explained. And a piece of fun news. Our friends at Unexplanable are going Hollywood today. They're adapting their beloved audio program into video for none other than Netflix. The first episode is up right now. Watch it wherever you watch your Netflix. All right.