Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is dead. How long will ICE be allowed to hide its face?

[Jilly_in_VA]

Jamil Smith

There are videos that do more than document a story. They alter the way we understand it.

Ronaldo Salgado spent 7 July searching for his father. At the scene of a shooting in Houston’s East End, he found his father’s work van behind police tape. Later, he saw a video online: a man had been shot in the street. Ronaldo could not identify him by sight. He recognized Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by his voice, crying for help.

The video of Ronaldo recounting that realization – and collapsing into grief – has not left me. That sound is all too familiar. It is evidence of what government power has produced.

We were warned. Shortly after federal immigration officers killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti, Senator Jon Ossoff asked why “roving gangs of masked men” were “demanding papers, dragging people from their cars, and shooting people to death”. A federal court ordered immigration agents in Chicago to wear body cameras, while state and local lawmakers pursued measures requiring agents to unmask and identify themselves. Yet Trump later signed a $70bn immigration-enforcement bill funding ICE and border patrol through 2029 without requiring agents to unmask or wear body cameras. Less than a month later, after Salgado Araujo’s killing, representative Sylvia Garcia says ICE’s acting director promised to equip all field officers with body cameras by the end of July.

We know the cost, but the Trump administration has at last conceded the principle: transparency is necessary.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/14/lorenzo-salgado-araujo-ice

But the ICEholes who shot Salgado weren't wearing bodycams. Neither were the ones who shot the Colombian in Biddeford. ME. And just why is that?