CNN panelists clashed on Saturday after conservative radio host Jason Rantz defended ICE and the FBI following a fatal shooting last week by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and the FBI seemingly getting its facts wrong about the incident.
The “Table for Five” discussion centered on Houston, Texas, where an ICE officer shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction worker and Mexican immigrant with three children who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years.
The FBI said in an affidavit filed Tuesday that the ICE personnel were “conducting an immigration enforcement operation” when they encountered Salgado Araujo in his work van and that he “drove over a median in an apparent attempt to flee” when an ICE officer fatally shot him.
CNN panelist Xochitl Hinojosa, a former spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, noted that “you don’t see FBI agents” fatally shooting people in the street, but that this is regularly “happening with ICE agents” — potentially due to a lack of training.
Rantz argued that the officer who shot Salgado Araujo didn’t “want to get hit by the vehicle that’s fleeing,” prompting Hinojosa to reiterate that other law enforcement agencies “aren’t out killing innocent people” at the same rate. Less than a week after the Houston shooting, an ICE officer fatally shot another man in Maine.
When fellow panelist and podcaster Cari Champion agreed that other agencies aren’t “just randomly killing people,” Rantz responded, “Well, ICE is not randomly killing people.”
“They are actually randomly killing people,” Champion replied. “In fact, because they do have a quota in place of 2,000 arrests per day. They are actually, probably, not trained to do their job effectively, in the way in which they should, and they should be partnering with other agencies so that this job can be done effectively.”
Rantz doubled down, asking, “How is it random?”
“It’s random because you’re targeting people and you’re suggesting, after … you murder someone … that they had methamphetamine,” said Champion. “And then you’re like, ’Wait a minute, wait a minute, it wasn’t that — it was actually something so they can stay hydrated.”
The FBI affidavit about the shooting said ICE officers found “crystal-like substances” in Salgado Araujo’s van “consistent with methamphetamine,” only for his family lawyer to explain it was granulated salt — which Salgado Araujo mixed with lemon and water as a homemade electrolyte mix to endure the Texas heat.
The attorney called for expedited testing and a full investigation into Salgado Araujo’s death.
“And this is why the FBI has typically taken its time until it has more information about any sort of shooting or any incident,” Hinojosa said Saturday. “Under Kash Patel, what has happened is that they have tried to rush to frame the narrative a certain way.”
She concluded, “And it’s not the way that you do law enforcement. I think we can say both in Houston and in Maine, these were massive law enforcement failures. And we have seen Kash Patel and our law enforcement agencies fail at every turn to try to get ahead of the narrative.”
Champion argued the law enforcement agencies in question are now attempting to “make this look good,” and told Rantz, “If you sit up here and tell me, straight face on a Saturday morning, that you don’t think that they’ve made mistakes in the people they’ve killed?”
Rantz said, “No, I don’t think they’ve — I don’t think they’ve committed murder.”