1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

On July 7, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a vehicle stop in Houston. The officers wore no body cameras. No dashboard camera recorded the stop. No footage has been released. The only account of how he died belongs to the agency whose officer pulled the trigger. I’m asking you to put body cameras on every ICE officer in the field and to require that every ICE shooting be investigated by an authority outside the agency, with use-of-force incidents reported to the public. ICE has now confirmed Lorenzo wasn’t the person agents were after. They were working from an administrative warrant for someone else, and he happened to resemble the target. He was 52, had built homes in Houston for more than three decades, raised three U.S. citizen sons, and had no criminal record. ICE says he tried to run an officer over. His family says he would have stopped had he known who was following him. Nothing independent exists to settle it. Three men from the van, including Lorenzo’s brother, are being held in Conroe. Their attorney warns they could be pushed to sign self-deportation papers before investigators ever interview them. Demand that these witnesses stay in the country until they’ve given a full account under independent questioning. Accountability isn’t anti-enforcement. Cameras and outside review clear officers who act lawfully and expose those who don’t. When federal agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, the government said she tried to run down an officer, and the video showed otherwise. The acting ICE director has now promised body cameras by month’s end. Don’t take the promise. Write it into law, and do it before the footage that doesn’t exist and the witnesses who do are both gone.