The three witnesses to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death seek a visa to protect them from deportation

The only three witnesses to the killing of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are being held at an ICE facility an hour north of Houston. On Wednesday, a path was opened to prevent their deportation through a visa granted to victims or witnesses of crimes.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO), which on Tuesday opened its own independent probe into the incident, confirmed to EL PAÍS that it had approved the process. “We can certify a U Visa petition for material witnesses in any pending case. That is what this office did for the three witnesses in the van,” communications chief Courtney Fischer said by email. It is now up to the men’s immigration attorneys to file the individual visa applications.

The three passengers travelling to work with Salgado Araujo in the van on July 7, 2026, were José Trinidad Rojas, 51; Daniel Tirado Pantoja, 43; and his brother, Víctor Salgado, 44. Their testimony is crucial to understanding the sequence of events that led ICE agents to shoot Salgado Araujo, even though he was not the target of the operation. Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra and Texas Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia have argued in recent days that the witnesses’ accounts differ from those provided to the media by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In sworn statements later cited at a Friday press conference, the immigrants disputed the claim that any ICE agent was in danger of being struck by the van. They said the shots were fired from the sides of the vehicle. Establishing the official account of what happened is complicated by the fact that, according to Congresswoman Garcia, the ICE officers involved in the operation were not wearing body cameras and their vehicles were not equipped with them either. As a result, the testimony of these three men has become central to the investigation.

Although the District Attorney’s Office has certified Trinidad, Tirado and Salgado as witnesses in the case, the next stage of protecting their immigration status could prove to be a lengthy bureaucratic process, given the difficulty of obtaining U visas. This comes at a time when the government is pursuing the fast-track deportation of undocumented immigrants, regardless of how many years they have lived in the United States.

The investigation into this case is crucial not only for clarifying the death of this father, who had no criminal record and was in the process of obtaining a work permit. It is also important because of the changes it could bring about in the way ICE agents conduct their operations. Less than a week after his death, another immigrant, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, was fatally shot by ICE agents under strikingly similar circumstances thousands of miles away in Maine.

The most significant change these two cases appeared to be prompting was ICE’s decision to suspend the use of traffic stops to detain immigrants. But shortly after that news emerged on Wednesday, President Donald Trump reinstated the tactic, calling it “one of ICE’s most important and effective crime fighting tools.”

The U visa, a process that can take years

A U visa is granted to people who have been victims of a crime, possess relevant information that could help solve it, and are willing to cooperate with law enforcement authorities, including prosecutors, police agencies, or judges. The certification issued by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office for Trinidad, Tirado and Lorenzo Salgado’s brother, Víctor, is only the first step in the process.

“It gives these three people the opportunity to apply for an immigration remedy to prevent deportation and to remain in the country as witnesses,” immigration attorney Haim Vásquez explained. The rest of the process, however, is far from quick. “Unfortunately, wait times for the U visa are extremely long. They can take five, six, seven years without being approved,” said Vásquez.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency responsible for approving these visas, acknowledges the lengthy waiting times. Each fiscal year, from October 1 to September 30, the number of U visas that can be granted is capped at 10,000. Priority is given to the oldest applications, which, because of the backlog, may have been filed as far back as 2017, according to USCIS.

Vásquez says that, depending on the specifics of each case, these witnesses could in practice remain in ICE detention facilities indefinitely. Once attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra files their petitions, the fate of the three immigrants’ applications will rest with USCIS, a federal agency that falls administratively under the Department of Homeland Security.

Attention has also turned to Balderas-Ibarra himself, who represents two of the witnesses. According to media reports, he faces criminal assault charges in courts in Florida and Texas that could force his removal from the case.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s family is scheduled to gather on Thursday for a wake at a chapel in Houston. David Cruz, communications director for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization, told EL PAÍS that the Mexican consulate would seek permission for Víctor Salgado to attend his brother’s funeral. Neither the consulate nor Mexico’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the information.

Questions over the investigation

The investigation into Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death has drawn sharp criticism of the agencies involved. The main complaint is that DHS did not coordinate with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office on the investigation of a shooting that occurred in its jurisdiction, despite that being the protocol followed in previous cases.

“Historically, the HCDAO has coordinated actions with federal investigators in prior probes into shootings in which a law enforcement officer fired on a civilian,” explained Fischer. On this occasion, she said, “they were not called to the scene [...] after the shooting in which Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was wounded.” However, the district attorney for that office, Sean Teare, said on Friday that his officials have collected evidence to present to the appropriate court.

Up to that point, the only agencies in charge were federal: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), investigating the “potential assault on an officer”; and a DHS office responsible for the operation in which Salcedo died. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences told this newspaper that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death was classified as a “homicide” and that the cause was a “penetrating gunshot wound to the torso.”

A week after the death of the 52-year-old father, and under growing pressure from the community over what critics saw as a failure to ensure an independent and transparent investigation, Houston Mayor John Whitmire took his first concrete step. Following a heated City Council meeting on Tuesday, Police Chief Noe Diaz sent a letter to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Freeman Martin requesting that the Texas Rangers investigate the shooting.

As a result, and only after the shooting scene had long since been cleared and transformed into a memorial covered with flowers and candles honoring Salgado Araujo, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced that the Texas Rangers “are now going to be involved in an investigation” alongside federal officials.

“We don’t want to see people shot. Period,” Abbott said in his first public comments on the shooting a week after it occurred. “I fully expect our immigration laws to be enforced, but it’s proven that immigration laws can be enforced and stopping illegal immigration from coming across our border can be achieved without shooting people.”

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