As thousands of people from all over the United States came to the Laguna Madre area this past weekend to watch SpaceX’s latest launch in South Texas, many who live in the nearest towns—Laguna Vista, Port Isabel, Laguna Heights, and South Padre Island—stayed indoors.  

Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents had been arresting several people in the area over the last few weeks, likely as part of a new federal directive from earlier this month to increase arrests to 2,000 a day across the country. The agency’s presence has led to residents making their own warning system to inform the community, many of whom are mixed-status, of where agents are at any given time.

Preceding many of these arrests was a car chase through the residential streets of Laguna Vista on July 14, happening the same day that the Trump administration issued a directive to ICE to temporarily halt most traffic stops, following the ICE killings of two people in Houston and Maine, according to reporting early that morning from the New York Times. The pause lasted about a day. 

But that afternoon, ICE agents in Laguna Vista—a town of around 4,000 in the Rio Grande Valley that’s a 20-minute drive from South Padre Island, where ICE agents killed a U.S. citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, in March last year—sped after a crew of roofers who were on their way back to a job site, according to witnesses. ICE confirmed that agents were in the area on July 14 when asked by the Observer. 

Traveling in two cars, a red Jeep and a dark-colored Ford Escape, the seven roofers were leaving a Stripes convenience store in Laguna Vista after their lunch break, heading back to their work site in town. A black SUV passed them on the two-lane Highway 510. The SUV made a U-turn, then accelerated towards them. The SUV, which was unmarked, did not have sirens on. 

The roofers, at some point, split, the red Jeep going down Fernandez Street and blowing past the four-way intersection at Taylor Street, the unmarked black SUV following close behind. Laguna Vista resident Samantha Weber Alarcón, who was driving with her son, was heading to a movie theater in Brownsville when she saw the Jeep and the black SUV run the stop sign on Fernandez Street in the early afternoon. 

Thinking it was the local police chasing a speeding teenager, she continued onto Fernandez and then onto Mesquite Drive, the end of which leads to Highway 100 toward Brownsville. She had just started driving down the street when a different car, the dark-colored Ford Escape, sped past her on the left, hitting a speedbump, then stopping in the driveway of a home halfway up the street. Close behind were the same black SUV and a white SUV, neither with sirens on, driving side by side trying to make “three lanes of traffic into a two-lane road,” Weber Alarcón told the Observer. 

“They speeded right next to me,” she said during a phone interview. “They hit the speed bump so bad that, when they got in front of me at high speed, I had to go to the right. … If not, they would have hit me.”

Now in a ditch on the side of the street, Weber Alarcón called 911. While she was on the phone with a dispatcher, she got out of her truck and started walking toward the SUVs. She could see that men had emerged from the SUVs with t-shirts, jeans, and green vests that said “ICE”—and that one of them was pointing a gun a few feet from the open back window of the Ford. Inside the Ford, a man in the backseat had his hands up, a paper bag with his lunch in one of them. 

“I guess I was in more fear because of what I had just seen happen to the young guy in Maine,” Weber Alarcón said, recounting her thoughts from that day. “I had just seen that in the morning before I left to the movies. So, can you imagine my train of thought when I saw him pull the gun on the kid?” 

The driver and front passenger of the Ford were gone. They had run off behind the house whose driveway they’d driven into, escaping from the agents who chased them on foot. Weber Alarcón began yelling at the agents that they had almost hit her and her son. She pulled out her phone and started taking photos of what she was seeing. She said that when she pulled her phone out, the agent put his gun down, took the man out of the backseat of the car, and put him in handcuffs. 

Weber Alarcón, believing the handcuffed man was a student she knew at Port Isabel High School, was yelling at the agents to let him go. By then, a Laguna Vista Police Department sergeant arrived and started making a report. Weber Alarcón said that the police officer repeatedly told her he could do nothing about what the agents were doing other than report it to the ICE agents’ supervisors. 

Realizing the man they pulled from the backseat was a U.S. citizen, the agents uncuffed him. Weber Alarcón started telling the agents again that their driving could have killed her and her son. She said one agent apologized and had “a million excuses” as to why they drove the way they did. Then one of the agents asked Weber Alarcón if she could take the man from the backseat home because the car he was riding in was now part of an investigation. The agents then sped away down the street, the Laguna Vista police officer yelling at them to slow down.

“I said [to the officer], ‘You see, they almost hit us, and they could care less,’” Weber Alarcón said.

Weber Alarcón then drove the man, who was not actually the student from Port Isabel High School, to his home in Brownsville. In a statement to the Observer, an ICE spokesperson said “officers were conducting targeted enforcement” in the area and “observed a vehicle driving erratically,” before the driver sped up to get away from the officers. “There was no vehicle pursuit or arrest attempt,” the spokesperson said.

The statement continued to say that, after the driver and passenger fled, agents encountered the “abandoned vehicle” with the young man in the backseat, claiming he ignored orders to exit the car and “began reaching into a tool bag”—where the spokesperson said “a knife was later discovered”—causing the officer to draw his gun. After the man exited with hands up, he was identified “as an 18-year-old U.S. citizen” and released.

The man, who spoke to the Observer on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals,  challenged ICE’s account. The alleged knife, he said, was a shingle cutter in his tool bag. He is also in his mid-twenties, not 18, as ICE stated.

“The car was not abandoned. They didn’t just show up to an abandoned vehicle. That’s a lie,” Weber Alarcón said when shown ICE’s statement. “They did a high-speed chase.”

Credit: Courtesy/Samantha Weber Alarcón

Credit: Courtesy/Samantha Weber Alarcón

Credit: Courtesy/Samantha Weber Alarcón

Weber Alarcón’s post about the incident has been shared thousands of times on Facebook. Since then, several other posts on the social media site have documented ICE agents in the Laguna Madre area surrounding vehicles or arresting people. 

ICE has limited authority to stop and question individuals they think are in the country illegally. Before agents stop someone, they must have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the U.S. without authorization. The bar is higher for warrantless arrests: Agents must have reason to believe the person may escape before they can get a warrant.

Agents can’t use race, ethnicity, accent, and the type of work someone does alone as motives to detain them, but they can be factors in deciding whether to do so. A Los Angeles federal court temporarily blocked the consideration of those factors last July, but the Supreme Court stayed that decision in an ongoing case.

From the Laguna Madre area, photos and videos collected on social media and sent to the Observer show ICE agents almost exclusively around trucks with construction or lawn care equipment in their beds. 

There is little legal recourse for people who are lawful permanent residents or U.S. citizens and are detained or arrested by ICE, even if their rights were likely violated.

“Just the experience of having a gun pointed at you, having agents aggressively approach your car, endangering people on the road, coming into your yard or home, obviously, that is an extremely traumatic event for anyone who has to experience it,” Michelle Lapointe, legal director for the American Immigration Council, told the Observer. “So even if those folks don’t end up being put in proceedings because they can’t be deported, and the government knows that, it’s still an extremely humiliating and traumatic experience.” 

Laguna Vista City Manager Victor Trevino told the Observer he had heard of the ICE chase but didn’t know any details. No Laguna Vista elected official responded to a request for comment, nor did the police chief, Daniel Holland. 

Unlike in larger cities across the country, where ICE made large shows of their descents into neighborhoods, the agency’s movement in the Valley is usually documented by community members on social media, as Weber Alarcón did. She says it was to warn other residents of the agency’s impunity.

“I sent it to everyone that I could, because I saw the disrespect that was given to our local police officers,” Weber Alarcón said. “That’s what I was so in fear of, myself. I was like, ‘Then that means we’re not safe at all. If our police officers here can’t help us, who’s going to help us?’” 

The post ICE Never Stopped Chasing People in Cars in the Rio Grande Valley appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The morning after a still-unnamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed 52-year-old Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on Tuesday, July 7, investigators from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office were on the scene. They hadn’t received an invitation from the federal agency, which was slightly unusual, but this wasn’t an oversight. It was the beginning of weeks of stonewalling by federal officials.

For starters, when DA investigators were allowed on scene, it had already been cleared and all the key pieces of evidence—including Araujo’s body and van—and even the ICE agents involved had been whisked away. 

“We realized this isn’t like other federal scenes before,” Courtney Fischer, spokesperson for Democratic Harris County DA Sean Teare, told the Texas Observer. The office investigates all officer-involved shootings in the county “parallel” to other departments’ investigations, and Fischer said that policy applies no matter what agency was involved. 

But this jurisdiction didn’t look so clear-cut to the federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General immediately took charge of investigating the shooting, while the FBI began looking into the allegation that Araujo had attempted to assault the ICE agent with his van. Residents and local leaders in Houston were quick to express distrust in the integrity of these federal probes, pushing the mayor’s office, city council, Houston Police Department, and DA’s office to conduct independent investigations of their own. The DA’s office quickly confirmed it was pursuing one—with the initially reluctant assistance of the city and HPD. 

But in the weeks after the fatal shooting in Houston’s predominantly Hispanic east side, local authorities have struggled to stake their claim on an investigation into a killing within the most populous Texas city’s limits. 

Houston (Shutterstock)

Teare said his office is investigating the potential that any number of crimes may have occurred, including murder, manslaughter, and tampering with evidence. If the office is able to build a case, Teare could present it to a Harris County grand jury, which would determine whether to charge the officer or officers involved. According to an article written by Bryna Godar, staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School, states have a “mixed track record” when attempting to criminally prosecute federal agents for state crimes committed on the job, but there is precedent and there are some standards established by the U.S. Supreme Court.

A local DA can’t force a federal official to appear in court or share direct evidence. The office does have subpoena power (and Teare has reportedly issued dozens), but a former prosecutor told the Houston Chronicle these subpoenas are often ignored. 

Teare, who’s in his second year in office, admits it could be a long, grueling process to build such a case. He told reporters at a July 13 press conference the investigation could take “many, many months, potentially years” to complete. This is in large part because they lack access: A week after the shooting, the DA’s office was receiving updates from DHS at the same time as the general public—via social media. Teare hinted his office may go to court if the federal agencies don’t cooperate with the local investigation. 

The office was given some level of access in the second week of the investigation, but only after a federal warrant to search Araujo’s van was unsealed against protocol, making public investigators’ allegation that there were potentially drugs in the vehicle. Harris County DA investigators asked to be present for the execution of the warrant and to get access to the van afterward, which the FBI granted. Now, after the apparent attempted character smear already made headlines, the DA confirmed that tests on the suspected white powder proved they were not narcotics.

The issues began in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, though, when Houston leaders disagreed on whether they even had the authority to investigate. 

Public outrage from Houston to Washington D.C. to Mexico’s Palacio Nacional was swift, but it seemed Houston Mayor John Whitmire wanted to distance the city from possible conflict with ICE. He stressed early on that HPD was not involved in the incident, and he erroneously stated that the department had no authority to investigate the shooting by a federal agent. A spokesperson from Whitmire’s office told the Observer he had been “advised” that the city lacked jurisdiction, but that he supported an independent investigation “from day one.”

University of Houston professor Brandon Rottinghaus told the Observer this shooting is “the most inflammatory that [Whitmire] has dealt with as mayor and maybe one of the most dramatic we’ve seen in recent history,” but that the mayor’s initial hesitation was less likely political and more likely an attempt to respect jurisdictions and chains of authority. (In April, Whitmire and the Houston City Council did bend to pressure from Governor Greg Abbott, who threatened to withhold millions in public safety funding after the city passed an ordinance limiting cooperation with ICE.)

HPD Chief Noe Diaz agreed with Whitmire’s initial assessment. The DA’s office, which has its own investigators, was the first local agency to act, but even Teare publicly demurred in the days immediately after the shooting, saying the federal agencies were “exclusively handling the case.”

Experts spoke up to quash the jurisdiction question, saying that federal officials can unequivocally be charged with state crimes. This wouldn’t be the first time the DA’s office undertook an investigation following a shooting by a federal agent. The DA brought the case against Gavin Lappe, an FBI agent who mistakenly shot and killed hostage Ulises Valladares in 2018, to a grand jury, which ultimately declined to indict him.  

Fort Bend District Attorney Brian Middleton, president of the Texas District & County Attorneys Association, stressed that federal investigations aim to determine whether someone broke a federal law, while local investigations look into state law violations. 

“Two completely different systems of laws, agencies, and prosecutors,” Middleton wrote in response to the Observer’s questions. Fort Bend County has not dealt with a shooting involving a federal officer, Middleton said, but: “No law prohibits such an investigation, though notice of and cooperation from the federal agency would be critical.  Additionally, access to evidence and witnesses, or a lack thereof, could pose challenges.”

The Harris County DA’s office, with limited access to any crime-scene evidence, didn’t have much to go on: Immediately after the shooting, officials from DHS claimed Salgado Araujo had tried to use his car as a weapon when the agent fired in “self-defense.” This is a familiar refrain, but unlike in other cases, it wasn’t immediately disproven by cell phone or body camera footage. In fact, the officers weren’t wearing body cameras, and the only footage that has surfaced related to the incident comes from surrounding businesses, which caught snippets of the pursuit. DA investigators have been collecting photo, video, and eyewitness evidence from the public, but nothing revelatory has yet publicly come out.

“What is there for state or local investigators to investigate?” asked Julian Ramirez, Houston City Council member, in an interview with the Observer. 

Teare has been speaking with Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty in Minnesota, who is handling investigations into ICE agents involved in the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier this year. She too faced a federal agency unwilling to share evidence, which her office received six months after the shootings and after suing for access. She reportedly helped the Harris County DA make a plan.

Fischer, the Harris County DA spokesperson, said it’s been challenging to explain to potential witnesses that their investigation is completely separate from the feds’. The DA’s office launched a portal where residents could submit photos or videos of the incident, and Fischer said officials are not sharing that evidence with the federal agencies. Still, people are “terrified to come forward,” she said. 

The Harris County DA’s office is assisting the other passengers who were present in the van when Araujo was shot get temporary visas to remain in the United States as witnesses to a crime. 

On July 15, the Texas Rangers, the statewide police force that investigates high-profile crimes, announced they would conduct their own independent investigation at the request of Whitmire and Diaz. They have reportedly been given access to the federal evidence. 

In response, Abbott said the Rangers are “well known not just in the state of Texas, but elsewhere for their independence in conducting investigations,” also saying that the Rangers would work “alongside federal officials.” 

Despite Teare stepping out on a limb, Texas DAs in general may be wary of getting out ahead of the governor in clashing with ICE. State leaders including Abbott have repeatedly attacked local prosecutors’ authority in recent years, including with a 2023 law that threatens DAs with removal if they opt not to pursue certain crimes. Abbott has also signaled that he’ll continue to challenge DAs in the upcoming legislative session: He wants to establish a statewide prosecutor’s office with the power to usurp local cases.

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