ICE Has Now Killed 10 People We Know Of. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo Was the Latest
His son recognized him in a viral video—not by his face, but by his voice, crying out for help. That is how Ronaldo learned his father was dead.
Imagine finding out your parent was murdered while scrolling on social media.
Ronaldo Salgado was scrolling through social media when a video stopped him. He did not at first recognize the man in the video by his face. The video was too far away and blurry. But then his blood ran cold. He recognized the man ICE attacked by his voice—crying out for help.
That is how a son learned that ICE had killed his father. ICE fascists have now killed 10 of our neighbors in 2026—that we know of. And the horrifying truth is that due to the lack of any accountability and consequences, more innocent people will die at their hands. We are not hopeless, and we must continue to fight back. Here’s how.
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Who Lorenzo Was
As Saadia Mirza, Houston-based State Director of Let’s Address Texas wrote:
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52 years old. He was a father of three sons and had lived in this country for nearly 35 years. He built homes in North Houston for over three decades and he had no criminal history. Lorenzo had recently done biometric scans and fingerprinting as part of his federal work permit application, and was close to obtaining legal status.
He was a small business owner who served and loved his community. Far from “being a leach on the system,” Lorenzo lived the American dream. Far from the lie that “immigrants are why we don’t have housing,” he literally built homes for decades. And far from the claim that “immigrants bring crime,” Lorenzo had no criminal history. Not a record. Not a charge. Nothing.
And on Tuesday morning in Houston, ICE killed him in broad daylight.
Then they lied, claiming Lorenzo was “trying to ram them with his car.” The video posted online showed quite the opposite—they they rammed him with their cars.
And then the injustice compounded—as it always does.
Lorenzo was not even the person ICE was looking for. The three witnesses who saw the shooting are now being pressured to self-deport—witnesses to a killing, being silenced by the very agency responsible for it. And Lorenzo’s family still cannot claim his body.
His family cannot bury him. They cannot say goodbye. They cannot grieve in the ordinary human way that every person who has ever loved someone deserves.
The president of Mexico has announced criminal charges against the Trump regime for killing a Mexican national unjustly. When a foreign government is filing criminal charges against the United States for killing its citizens on American soil—we have crossed a threshold that demands we say plainly what this is: Tyranny and fascism.
The Ten We Know Of
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is the tenth person ICE has killed this year—that we know of. I add, “that we know of,” because we do not know the actual number.
ICE is withholding data on deaths in its custody. The Trump regime is not meaningfully enforcing any requirement to publish that data. ICE continues to block access to its detention facilities—which I will call what they really are: Gulags. Concentration camps. Places where human beings are held without adequate medical care, without due process, without transparency, and apparently without accountability even when they die or are killed.
Ten is the floor. The ceiling is unknown—deliberately, by design.
I want you to know their names.
Alex Pretti. Renee Good. Keith Porter. Heber Sanchez Domínguez. Victor Manuel Diaz. Parady La. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
Ten people. Ten families shattered. Ten names that corporate media has not placed on a front page, not read aloud in a primetime broadcast, not demanded congressional hearings over. Indeed, after each murder, the media cycle moves on.
I share this not to depress you, but to remind you of the work we have cut out before us. And to share some positive news—what progress looks like as we fight back.
What Accountability and Resistance Look Like
It would be easy—understandable, even—to feel that the scale of this cruelty is insurmountable. That the machinery of ICE, backed by the full authority of the executive branch and a Supreme Court majority willing to bless almost anything, cannot be stopped.
I want to tell you about Florida. Because Florida just proved otherwise.
“Alligator Alcatraz”—the grotesquely named immigration detention center built deep in the Florida Everglades—has been shut down. Not by a congressional vote. Not by a court order alone. By people who refused to stop showing up.
Two groups led this fight. The first is the Miccosukee Tribe—a Native community that found refuge in the Everglades centuries ago specifically to escape persecution by white supremacists, fleeing deep into those swamps to survive. Their ancestral lands became the site of a concentration camp for immigrants. They joined a lawsuit and they showed up—at nearly 50 protests over the course of a year—outside the facility built on the land their ancestors bled to reach.
The second is The Workmen’s Circle—a 125-year-old secular Jewish organization whose entire existence is a testament to the principle that “never again” must mean never again for everyone. They stood alongside the Miccosukee people, protest after protest, week after week, until the pressure became impossible to ignore.
As El País reported:
The Miccosukee community found refuge from white persecution deep in the Everglades swamps centuries ago. Together with environmental groups, they succeeded in forcing the closure of the immigration detention center built on their ancestral lands.
A Native tribe whose ancestors fled white supremacy. A century-old Jewish organization whose founders fled pogroms. Standing together. Showing up together. Winning together.
This real time example is a reminder of what this country is capable of when people of conscience refuse to go home. Use that in your local community, and let’s continue to build towards justice.
Lorenzo Deserved Better—So Does Every Person on That List
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo spent 35 years building homes in Houston. He raised three sons. He was doing everything the system asked of him—the biometrics, the fingerprints, the paperwork, the patience. He was close. He was following the rules of a country that rewarded his decades of labor and love with a bullet and a viral video that his son stumbled across while scrolling through his phone.
It is a cruel system that forces people to jump through decades of bureaucracy to get “legal” status, and then kills him in cold blood because he doesn’t have the required paperwork in hand.
His family cannot claim his body. Witnesses to his killing are being threatened into silence. The agency responsible faces no accountability. And the president who empowered that agency is not being held accountable by a Congress too cowardly to act and a media too distracted to sustain outrage.
But here is what I know. The Miccosukee Tribe held 50 protests. The Workmen’s Circle stood with them every time. Alligator Alcatraz is closed. Ten people we know of have been killed—and because we know their names, because journalists and advocates and community members refused to let those names disappear, the pressure is building.
Every protest matters. Every lawsuit matters. Every article that refuses to let Lorenzo’s name fade into a statistic matters. Every person who calls their congressman, who shows up at a demonstration, who refuses to normalize the killing of human beings by a federal agency operating without transparency or accountability—matters.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s voice was crying out for help in that video. His son heard it. Now we have all heard it.
Let it remind you that we must continue to use our voices, while we still have them.
Qasim Rashid is a human rights attorney, author, and host of Let’s Address This—a platform dedicated to human rights, accountability, and the people powered independent media that corporate media refuses to provide. Subscribe, share, and let’s remain relentless in our mission for a more perfect Union.
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I wish Substack had a different icon denoting acknowledgement. It sucked to hit a little “Like heart” regarding this post as well as others. I don’t “like” it….I acknowledge it. Since regular media is not covering this very well, I have been talking with the people in my community about his death. Especially since I have a community that spans the proverbial rainbow of ethnicities. Thanks for spotlighting Mr. Araujo. I was not amused by the masked White Nationalists who showed up on the 4th in DC, either. Unfortunately, I hail from that mentality and am fully aware that it exists. Masks are for freaking cowards, though.
"We must continue to use our voices, while we still have them." YES. In every way yes.
This is what effective resistance looks like: everyday people standing up and demanding a change NOW, on our schedule, rather than allowing the politicians to control the timing and wait for November.
We must do this now, on a national scale. Our existing electoral system has been perverted beyond recognition, not just by Trump, but by politicians of both parties. If we do not disavow our partisanship and raise our voices to reject this perversion of America while we still have the political leverage of "midterms coming up", we may never get the chance again.