A federal immigration agent killed a man from Mexico on Tuesday in Houston, firing into the car that the man was driving. It was at least the 21st shooting by agents involved in President Trump’s deportation crackdown since he took office for his second term in January 2025.
Five people, including three U.S. citizens, were killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing at people in vehicles.
Here’s what we know.
What happened in Houston?
It’s unclear, but officials with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said officers stopped a vehicle around 6:50 a.m. and tried to arrest the driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
The driver “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent, who fired at him, the agency’s statement said.
This is the same language that federal officials have used repeatedly to describe other shootings by immigration agents. In many instances, those initial descriptions — including claims that officers had been assaulted or injured — later unraveled in court.
No evidence was immediately provided to support the federal officials’ account of shooting of Mr. Araujo. He suffered a gunshot wound to his abdomen, was taken to a hospital and died, said Rustin Rawlings, a spokesman for the Houston Fire Department.
The authorities did not say why Mr. Araujo was being sought, and did not provide video camera footage of the encounter.
Are there other accounts of the shooting?
Videos on social media appear to show immigration agents hovering over a man holding his abdominal area. Other images of the encounter show a second man on the ground with his hands behind his back, as someone appears to scream in pain.
Ronaldo Salgado, Mr. Araujo’s son, said his family was seeking an independent investigation into yesterday’s events.
Federal authorities said the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office would conduct an investigation of the shooting by the agent. The Houston office of the F.B.I. will focus its investigation into what the authorities have called an assault on a federal law enforcement officer.
What has happened in prior shootings involving federal agents?
Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in January during a weekslong immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. One of those citizens, Renee Good, was killed in her vehicle, while the other, Alex Pretti, was kneeling and restrained in the street.
In February, revelations emerged that ICE agents had shot and killed a third U.S. citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, in March 2025 during a traffic stop in Texas. And Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant, was killed in Chicago last October after officers fired at his vehicle as he drove away.
Many of the drivers fired on by federal agents have later been charged with assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon — their vehicle. It’s a crime that can carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
But seven of the 13 people who were charged with crimes after encounters in which federal agents opened fire have prevailed in court, having their cases dismissed. Two people pleaded guilty, and four other cases are still pending.
In perhaps the highest-profile of those cases, an immigration agent in Minneapolis claimed in January that three assailants had beaten him with a shovel and broom before he opened fire on a Venezuelan immigrant.
Video of the incident contradicted the agent’s claim, and charges against the man who was shot were later dropped. The agent, Christian J. Castro, was then charged himself by Minnesota prosecutors with assault and filing a false police report. He was arrested in Texas, where he is fighting extradition.
Is the number of shootings unusual?
Before President Trump’s crackdown, shootings involving federal immigration agents had been far more common at or near the border than in cities or towns in the nation’s interior, though that appears to have shifted during the president’s second term.
Over the past three years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded about 15 shootings each year, according to public data provided by the agency. There have been nine shootings involving Border Patrol agents so far this year.
In the 12 months through September 2024, the last fiscal year before Mr. Trump’s re-election, an internal ICE committee investigated three incidents in which an officer had fired a gun, according to the agency’s annual report.
In the fiscal year before that, there were five incidents in which an ICE officer used a firearm.
Are agents allowed to shoot into vehicles?
Law enforcement experts have said that standing in front of a car, as the agent in Minneapolis did before killing Ms. Good, and firing into a vehicle break with widely accepted best practices in American law enforcement — and with the federal government’s own protocols.
Federal policy says that immigration officers are authorized to use deadly force only if they have a “reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury,” and that they should not place themselves in a position where they “have no alternative.”
Albert Sun and Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.
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