‘Big godd-mn deal!’: Congressman Menefee calls for justice after ICE fatally shoots Houston man

“What other profession has the power to take somebody’s life in the middle of a street?” said U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) during a recent news conference.

U.S. Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) is demanding a transparent investigation after a Houston man was fatally shot by an ICE officer on Tuesday, leaving his family devastated and with more questions than answers.

“To be clear, somebody being killed by law enforcement is a big goddamn deal!” Menefee, a freshman congressman representing Texas’s 18th Congressional District based in Houston, said during a news conference.

“What other profession has the power to take somebody’s life in the middle of a street?” he continued. “We need a full and transparent investigation into what happened here, and all of the evidence needs to be released to the public.”

On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old husband and father of three, was shot and killed by an ICE officer during an apparent traffic stop. Salgago Araujo, a Mexican national, was driving his work van with his construction crew when he was pulled over by ICE in an unmarked vehicle.

During the encounter, an unidentified agent fatally shot Salgado Araujo in the stomach while inside his van. According to the Associated Press, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Salgado Araujo ignored commands, struck an ICE vehicle in front of him, and that the officer fired his weapon in self-defense. The Trump administration said it was targeting Salgado Araujo because he was living in the U.S. without legal authorization.

However, Salgado Araujo’s family disputes ICE’s account of the interaction. His son, Ronaldo Araujo, said his father would never have tried to evade agents if he knew they were law enforcement. Salgado Araujo was close to obtaining legal status, the son claimed. Ronaldo Araujo also said his father, who built homes for a living, likely feared that the unmarked vehicle was potentially someone seeking to steal his tools, which he had used for 35 years.

Daniel Tirado, who was also in the vehicle with Salgado Araujo, had called his wife before the fatal shooting, saying that the group of men was being followed.

Congressman Menefee compared the shooting of Salgado Araujo to the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, which sparked local and nationwide protests against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration operations.

“We’ve seen this across the country, and now we’re seeing it in Houston. I want to see all the evidence, but regardless of what the evidence shows, we should not have these folks in our city taking people’s lives,” said the 38-year-old Democrat, who said Houston was a “city of undocumented immigrants,” describing them as “Our neighbors” who “deserve to be treated with humanity and with dignity.”

He continued, “Lorenzo should be here with us today…This is awful. This is an abomination, and we need ICE out of our city.”

When asked by KHOU 11 what a fair investigation would look like, Rep. Menefee said it is important that everyone who witnessed the shooting of Salgado Araujo be interviewed and that any video evidence that captured the shooting be turned over and publicly released.

“It’s important to get their perspective on what happened in this engagement…we cannot just all sit back and trust the word of ICE. They have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. They have shown their agency to be radicalized, and we need to make sure that a thorough investigation is conducted,” said Menefee.

The U.S. congressman said it is also important for local authorities to conduct their own investigations separate from the federal government’s probe.

“We’ve seen in other places in this country, including in Minnesota, that local law enforcement can be a check on the federal government and fighting to get records that the federal government won’t make public,” he explained. “It’s about ensuring that these folks are held accountable.”

Menefee, who is a member of the U.S. House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, said that “when” Democrats win majority control of the U.S. House, they will pursue aggressive investigations into ICE and Homeland Security.

He vowed, “When Democrats take the House back, ICE, you better buckle up, because we will be investigating you day after day after day until this lawlessness and this militarism stops,” he