Later, he called back and corrected himself. Johan was not the man ICE had come to arrest. Officials now say he apparently resembled the intended target and was leaving an address associated with him.⁵,⁶
That changes where this story begins. Before the moving car and the frightened agent, federal officers decided to pursue Johan. Did they compare him carefully with the target’s photograph? Check the license plate? Identify the driver? Or did he simply look close enough while leaving the wrong place at the wrong time?
Six days earlier in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo got up before dawn and packed his lunch. Lorenzo, 52, had spent more than three decades building houses. He drove a white van and collected his construction crew before most of Houston had turned on its lights. At the end of long workdays, he liked sitting on the porch with music playing and the family dog nearby.⁷
ICE agents in unmarked vehicles pursued and stopped his van. Lorenzo was not the man they were looking for either.
Officials said agents associated white vans with their target and thought Lorenzo resembled him. ICE says he rammed a government vehicle and drove toward an officer. The three men riding with him, including his brother, dispute that account. They say no agent was in the van’s path and that the bullets came through its side. There was no body-camera or dashboard recording.⁸
Two working fathers were killed six days apart. Both were stopped while ICE was trying to find somebody else. In both cases, the government says a vehicle became a weapon. In both, witnesses have complicated the official account. Neither shooting was recorded by an agent’s body camera.
Now the Trump administration has ordered ICE to suspend most vehicle stops nationwide. Border czar Tom Homan calls it a temporary pause while the agency reviews its tactics and provides more training. Exceptions remain for criminal warrants and some joint operations.⁹,¹⁰
The pause does not prove either officer committed a crime. It does, however, puncture the idea that these confrontations were unavoidable. They were created by a tactic: armed officers in unmarked vehicles pursuing or surrounding moving cars while trying to identify people by addresses, automobiles and physical resemblance.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE, asked the obvious question. If these shootings were justified because officers found themselves in danger, why was ICE putting them in danger by ordering them to conduct traffic stops?¹¹
That would have been a useful question before Johan and Lorenzo died.
There are also reasons not to accept the first official statement as the last word. In Biddeford, the government initially told a United States senator that Johan was the warrant subject. It later admitted he wasn’t. In Houston, witnesses dispute the agency’s account, while the surviving passengers remained in ICE custody. The lesson isn’t that every officer lies or that every shooting is unjustified. It is that an official statement is still only an account—especially when no body-camera footage exists and the government has already corrected a central fact.
Families experience all this in language less abstract than reasonable suspicion or tactical review. Lorenzo’s sons said they learned through social media that their father had been killed. Days later, they were still asking about his van, tools, wallet, phone and the lunch he packed that morning.⁷,¹²
Johan worked long hours, including making food deliveries.