Liberty and Justice for All
Floor Speech
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Ms. GARCIA of Texas. Thank you to the gentlewoman from California for the time.
Mr. Speaker, I am here to speak about a killing in my district. On July 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an unarmed man with no criminal record, who was not even the target of their investigation.
He was headed to a construction job when ICE aggressively pursued his van in an unmarked vehicle. No sirens, no body cameras, no dash cameras, just two unmarked cars following him.
Then, an ICE agent fired through the open passenger's side window where Mr. Lorenzo's brother was sitting and killed him.
Afterward came the same disgraceful playbook we saw after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. They claim Lorenzo, who was the driver, had weaponized his vehicle and that an agent had acted in self-defense.
I spoke directly with two of the men inside that van. They told me ICE never identified themselves, never gave commands, and no agent was ever in front of the van.
Then, in an added layer of cruelty, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, released Mr. Salgado's name publicly before notifying his family.
I was at the hospital when his son had to learn, through Facebook, that his father was dead. It was sickening. It was disheartening. It was despicable.
Days later, DHS tried to smear Lorenzo even further by suggesting that drugs had been found in the van. It was not drugs. It was a homemade electrolyte mix workers use to survive the Texas heat.
This is an outrageous abuse of government power. ICE pursued the wrong van and killed an unarmed man who wasn't their target and had no criminal record, and now we are expected to trust DHS to investigate itself. That is laughable. Absolutely not. No way. We need a real, independent investigation. We need all evidence released, and we need real accountability.
We also need the truth about what happened to Mr. Salgado. His family deserves the truth. The public deserves accountability. We need justice for Mr. Salgado, and we need justice for all those killed at the hands of ICE or those in the custody of ICE.
We demand accountability, and as the gentlewoman has said, we need real justice for all.
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