A man fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Houston, Texas, last week was carrying salt, not drugs, an attorney for his family said in a statement that urged expedited testing on the substance and the release of the victim’s brother.
“You cannot shoot first and ask questions later,” attorney Ruby Powers said Thursday, while representing Victor Salgado Araujo, who survived the July 7 shooting that killed his older brother Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
“An unidentified substance is not a confirmed narcotic. We are requesting that the substance testing be expedited so that their names be cleared,” she said.
Agents reported finding a bagged, unidentified “white crystal-like substance” on the vehicle’s dashboard and floorboard that the men, who worked in construction, were driving.
This substance was granulated salt, which would be mixed with lemon and water to create an electrolyte beverage for when working in extreme outdoor temperatures. It was not methamphetamine or any other illicit substance, Powers said.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare told CNN on Thursday that he also doesn’t believe the substance found is drugs. Regardless of whether the substance is illegal or not, it “has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not the use of force that killed Mr. Salgado was justified,” he added.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has said that the agents, who were not wearing body cameras, were looking for two Guatemalan men driving a white van when they saw a similar-looking van being driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood.
The agents opened fire after the vehicle ignored their commands and tried to take off while an officer was “partially inside the van or immediately next to it,” said Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, in a statement Thursday.
He asked the public for calm and a chance to fully investigate.
“We are doing everything we can to seek the truth and do the right thing,” he said.
ICE and DHS have a history of lying about the people whom federal agents shoot.
A Houston attorney who said he spoke with three of the men in Salgado Araujo’s vehicle called DHS’ description of the shooting “completely false.”
“At no point did they ever use the van to ram into the ICE agents, and at no point were these ICE agents’ lives ever in any danger,” Hugo Balderas-Ibarra said in a video posted to Instagram.
He added, “The ICE agents’ accounts of what happened do not reflect — and are very inconsistent with — the stories, with the recollections, that I got from the three people that were in the vehicle with Lorenzo.”