Let’s just get to the point.
Gregory Feathers.
The ICE agent who shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is Gregory Feathers, according to The Texas Tribune.
It took nearly three months, but an official familiar with the investigation who isn’t authorized to speak publicly gave the Tribune that name. A single anonymous source wouldn’t be much to hang a story on, and the Tribune didn’t stop there. Records back it up, including a Form I-213, which is essentially ICE’s version of a police report, complete with the agents’ own description of the chase and shooting.
Those forms aren’t supposed to be public, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office released this one by mistake last month before sealing it. Feathers also turns up in other records as the person who called paramedics right after the shooting and as one of two arresting agents in the pursuit.
On top of all that, Salgado Araujo’s brother Victor, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, picked Feathers out of a photograph, and the official separately confirmed the ID. To be fair, none of the documents come right out and say Feathers pulled the trigger, and he hasn’t been charged with anything. His lawyer declined to comment, citing a DHS policy against speaking during a pending investigation.
For anyone who missed my earlier coverage of the shooting and the subsequent cover-up, here’s the short version.
Around 6:50 am on July 7, ICE agents chased a white work van through Houston’s East End with 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo behind the wheel, a construction business owner who’d lived in this country for nearly 35 years and had no criminal record. DHS says he rammed an agent’s vehicle and tried to run an officer over.
Victor and the two other men in the van tell a different story, saying they had no idea immigration agents were behind them because the agents were riding in unmarked black SUVs. According to Victor, an agent on foot fired through the window and hit his brother in the stomach, and he described it to the Tribune this way. “The bullet passed right in front of me.” His ears rang for hours afterward; agents threw him to the ground and injured his knee.
Victor heard his brother scream that they’d already killed him. Lorenzo died at a local hospital while his own son watched. Victor, who was released from ICE detention last month, now says it would have been better if they’d killed him too, given what’s been done to his family.
Remember when I said DHS called this a “targeted enforcement operation”? Well, according to the Tribune, the original tip came from a local law enforcement agency in Montgomery County and had nothing to do with Salgado Araujo or anyone in his van.
ICE agents wrote in their report that they later got information from the Texas Department of Public Safety identifying three Guatemalan men, although a DPS spokesperson denies handing over anything that led to the pursuit.
While watching the men they were actually after, the agents could only make out the first two letters of the license plate on the van they were looking for. Those two letters matched Salgado Araujo’s van, which happened to be parked in the same area.
Agents ran the plate, learned he was from Mexico with no criminal record and, in their view, in the country illegally, and gave chase anyway, even though neither he nor his passengers were ever the target.
Two letters. A man is dead because somebody squinted at half a license plate and decided that was close enough. In your local area, how often do you see a license plate that shares letters with yours? Where I live in Kansas, I see it a lot. Any real cop who pulled over a car after only matching two letters on the license plate would be laughed out of their department. At least, I hope they would.
It also doesn’t help that ICE has apparently decided to start acting like a police department without bothering to get the training. Before this administration, ICE agents didn’t typically make traffic stops to carry out deportations. Now we’re seeing pit maneuvers, cars being slammed, guns used to detain people, and chokeholds. Those are civil immigration officers, not cops, and they’re being turned loose with a paramilitary budget and almost no oversight.
Then there’s the drug angle. Within hours of Salgado Araujo’s death, the FBI’s search warrant claiming drugs had been found in his van was made public. DPS later confirmed it wasn’t drugs at all but crystallized salt used to make cheap hydration drinks for construction workers trying to survive Houston’s summer heat.
So the government killed a man, then rushed out a document painting him as a drug dealer, and it turned out to be the stuff you stir into water on a hot job site. If that isn’t dragging his name through the mud, as his sons put it, I don’t know what is.
Now let’s talk about Feathers himself, or at least what little we know. According to two people familiar with his employment history, he’d previously retired and was rehired within the last two years, right as the administration was aggressively recruiting former ICE officers to help hit its deportation goals.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia, whose district includes where Salgado Araujo was killed, sent DHS detailed written questions about him, including his training and history, his salary, whether he’s collecting his pension while also drawing a paycheck, and whether he received the $50,000 signing bonus the administration reportedly dangled in front of applicants. DHS never answered, and neither did his lawyer. So it’s entirely possible the guy who killed a man on a Houston street is being paid twice by the taxpayers, once to stay retired and once to go out and kill people of color.
As for why we’re only learning his name from a news outlet, DHS has a familiar answer. A spokesperson told the Tribune that doxxing officers puts their lives and their families in serious danger and blamed sanctuary politicians and their “malicious rhetoric.”
It’s a tired excuse that it falls apart the second you compare it to how everyone else does this. Texas’ four biggest police departments, in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas, generally release the names of officers who shoot someone within about three days, and they usually put out body camera footage within a month.
Other immigration agents who’ve killed people have been identified by outlets like ProPublica and the New York Times, and there’s been no public indication that any of them were attacked afterward.
Outside of undercover work, where an officer’s identity could actually compromise an investigation, nobody else in law enforcement gets to hide behind a mask and a press statement. That’s the point I’ve been hammering for months, and it’s nice to see the Tribune make it too. If this were any other cop, we’d know his name by now, and there would be a far more thorough look at his record. Instead, DHS won’t tell even members of Congress, who are usually entitled to more information than the rest of us.
The same statement insisted that DHS officers are on the frontlines arresting terrorists, gang members, murderers, pedophiles, and rapists. Maybe some of them are, though I have serious doubts about how many, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo wasn’t any of those things. He was a construction business owner with no criminal record who got chased down in his work van. Even if every word of that statement were true, it wouldn’t change the fact that these agents keep killing civilians and nobody is ever held responsible for it. I also find it more than ironic that anyone associated with this administration is saying they’re busy arresting pedophiles, but I digress.
The spokesperson also rattled off some numbers, claiming a more than 1,600% increase in assaults, a 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks, and an 8,000% increase in death threats against ICE agents since Trump returned to office. Take those for what they’re worth, but if they’re even marginally accurate, I think I know why.
The administration has flooded the streets with thousands of untrained or undertrained stormtroopers, put masks on them, and told them to go chase down anyone who looks like a deportation target. Then we act surprised when people panic and some driver who doesn’t know these are federal agents hits the gas, which gets conveniently labeled a “vehicular attack” and used to justify the gunfire. That’s the whole “weaponized vehicle” racket in a nutshell.
So where does that leave us? Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare is convening a grand jury, with help from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and it may actually produce criminal charges for Feathers. I’d love to be optimistic about that, but prosecuting a federal agent at the state level is a Sisyphean task, especially when the feds won’t cooperate.
Grand juries have also declined to indict federal agents before, as one in Cameron County did this spring in the killing of Ruben Ray Martinez, and it took his mother a year just to learn an ICE agent was responsible.
And even with a name in hand, there’s nothing stopping Feathers from becoming yet another ICE agent who disappears into the wind and turns up on the streets of a different city, the way Renee Good’s killer reportedly did.
We finally have a name for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killer. Now we get to see if anyone in power has the spine to do something about it.
(Source)
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