Two Lorenzos from Mexico. One fulfilled his American dream. ICE killed the other

They were Mexican immigrants, both named Lorenzo.

They came to this country without papers as teenagers. Lack of legal status didn’t stop them from building beautiful lives — a wife, a home, a loving dog. A blue-collar job that paid the bills, weekend carne asadas with friends and family, children who followed their father’s example of hard work.

The Lorenzos enjoyed the fruits of their labor in their adopted land, even as they battled to become American citizens while politicians demonized immigrants as invaders and worse.

Lorenzo Arellano arrived in the United States in 1968 and didn’t get his citizenship until nearly 30 years later. Back then, the path to naturalization was far easier.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo arrived in the early 1990s, when those opportunities were becoming severely limited.

Lorenzo Arellano is my father, a happily retired truck driver living in Anaheim.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, who ran his own construction crew, was on his way to a job with his brother and two other men when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him dead on July 7 in Houston.

World & Nation

Mexican-born builder fatally shot by an ICE officer in Texas is mourned at vigil

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican-born Texas builder killed in a confrontation with ICE officers, is remembered as a devoted family man who got up before dawn and worked hard.

July 11, 2026

When I see a photo of Salgado Araujo beaming in front of a cake with the number 52 on it at the well-kept home he built with his own hands, I’m reminded that we’ll be celebrating my father’s 75th birthday next month. When I see video of Salgado Araujo’s feet twitching on the ground with two ICE agents next to him as he bleeds out and moans for help, I weep.

Only geography, age and Donald Trump separated the Lorenzos. Even their children — he had three boys, while my father had two boys and two girls — are similar. The Salgado Araujos, like the Arellanos, are college-educated. The eldest son, Ronaldo, is a teacher like my sisters. He wears glasses like me and is now telling the story of his father to the nation, as I have for decades.

I write about my Papi as the puckish personification of immigrant America.

Ronaldo is eulogizing his dad way too soon.

“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said proudly at a news conference the day after his father’s death — words I’ve always said about my Papi. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE’” — words I hope to never utter but can sadly see as a possibility given la migra’s unapologetic shoot-first approach and indiscriminate targeting of anyone brown.

Salgado Araujo’s killing came as part of the Trump administration’s newest deportation surge — the New York Times reported that the feds have arrested nearly 2,000 people a day since the end of June. The rate is higher than ICE’s campaign of terror last summer, yet it hasn’t drawn the same attention, fulfilling the promise of newish Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that la migra would operate far more quietly and efficiently than under his reckless predecessor, Kristi Noem.

Those quiet times are over.

Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, dries his tears while talking at a news conference on July 8 in Houston. His father was shot and killed by ICE agents the day before.

(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)

Vigils are popping up across the country in Salgado Araujo’s name. Stories about his life and death have replaced those about Mexico’s World Cup run on my social media timelines. They are heartbreaking, infuriating and a baleful reminder for Mexican Americans that these last five weeks of soccer, as joyful as they were, didn’t change our precarious status in this country under President Trump.

“He deserved to live a quiet life as a husband, a father and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream,” Ronaldo said at the news conference through tears as his younger brother, Lorenzo Jr., comforted him. That their father never will — that the Department of Homeland Security is now smearing his name by claiming he “weaponized” his van by trying to run over an agent, even though video evidence proves no such thing — is the latest indictment against the Trump administration’s cruelty toward the undocumented.

Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the target of ICE’s operation. His family said he had applied for a work permit and was on his way toward finally obtaining legal status.

We should heed Ronaldo’s words about his father. As people protest and seek justice, we should also hail the life of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo the way we one day will hail the life of Lorenzo Arellano — as Mexicans who made it, challenges be damned. And we should continue to fight for immigrants who remain in legal limbo, afraid for their lives more than ever.

I called my father to ask how he felt about a tocayo — someone with the same first name — losing his life to la migra.

“I put myself in his place and lament that ese [that] Lorenzo couldn’t get the citizenship that I could,” Papi said in Spanish.

He remembered how immigration agents “did it with respect” when they caught him living in this country illegally in the 1970s and 1980s.

“They asked you for your papers, and if you didn’t have them, they put handcuffs on you, you got deported and that was that. None of these beatings or shootings that are happening now under Trump,” he said. The worst it ever got was when he said he was going to Los Angeles, and an agent snapped that he was going to L.A. but now had to return to Mexico.

Papi asked me what justification ICE has offered for killing Salgado Araujo.

“I hope they put those people who killed him in prison for many years,” he said with disgust. “Will they?”

I replied that probably wasn’t going to happen. ICE has shot and killed 11 people during Trump’s second term, both citizens and noncitizens, and scores more have died in immigration detention. No agents have faced charges for any of these deaths. The agents involved in Salgado Araujo’s killing didn’t even have dashboard cameras or body cameras, a convenient oversight that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed on “multiple government shutdowns.”

“Pues, Dios sabe que todo se paga en la vida,” my dad responded. Well, God knows you reap what you sow.

Ronaldo Salgado and Lorenzo Jr., sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, hold a photograph of their father during a news conference July 8 in Houston.

(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)

Nothing can bring Lorenzo Salgado Araujo back to his loved ones. But I hope they find solace in his namesake, St. Lawrence. Tradition has it that Roman authorities roasted the Spanish deacon to death after Emperor Valerian demanded that he turn over the treasures of the Church. Instead, Lawrence presented the emperor with the city’s poor and maligned, insisting that he confront the oppression he had forced on them.

May we remember Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as a modern-day martyr, killed because our government refused to give him and so many others a chance at living in this country without fear.

May his name resonate through the ages as embodying the promise and tragedy of the American dream.