The only three witnesses to the death of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are currently detained at an agency facility an hour north of Houston. On Wednesday, a path opened for them to avoid deportation through a visa granted to crime victims or witnesses.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO), which launched an independent investigation into the incident on Tuesday, confirmed it had given its approval for 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,” said Courtney Fischer, the office’s communications chief, in an email. It is now up to the Mexican nationals’ immigration attorneys to file the immigration petitions for each of them.
The three passengers traveling to work in the van alongside Salgado Araujo on July 7, 2026, were José Trinidad Rojas, 51; Daniel Tirado Pantoja, 43; and his brother, Víctor Salgado, 44. The testimony of these three Mexican nationals 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. As attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra and Texas Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia have recently stated, their accounts differ from the version shared with the media by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In sworn statements—later cited at a press conference on Friday—the immigrants denied that any of the agents were in danger of being struck by the van and asserted that the shots were fired from the sides of the vehicle. Officially verifying the facts is complicated because, according to Democratic Congresswoman Garcia, the ICE officers involved in the operation were not wearing body cameras, nor did their vehicles have cameras. That is why these three men are crucial to the investigation.
Although the Prosecutor’s Office has certified Trinidad, Tirado, and Salgado as witnesses in the case, the process of defending their immigration status could turn into a long, drawn-out bureaucratic marathon due to the difficulty of obtaining U visas. This is happening at a time when the government is pushing for the expedited deportation of immigrants, regardless of how many years they have lived in the United States.
