On July 7, 2026, at about 7 am in Houston, Texas, an ICE agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as they tried to arrest him during an immigration enforcement operation.
As the details, and the disputes over them, continue to resonate, it is generally accepted that ICE sought Araujo, who was a Mexican national, for arrest during a “targeted enforcement operation.”
ICE said that Araujo tried to run over an ICE agent with his vehicle, resulting in that agent shooting him.
Araujo died later at a hospital.
This unfortunate incident took place in a region of Texas that really isn’t the Texas most people think of. Culturally closer to Louisiana than cowboyish inland Texas, it’s a patchwork of different sorts of people.
You have blue collar Democrats in the heavily Mexican East Side, and stereotypical Democrats in the predominantly black Third and Fifth Wards.
You also have stereotypical Democrat unicorns in the area of Montrose who inspire you to watch out when you bend down to get something, and cosmopolitan professionals that could go either way in more than one sense populating the Rice University area, the Heights, and the Medical Center.
With all of this, one would be hoping for some actual Texas traits there. And they exist in the form of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which was and is a huge cultural institution, reminding Houston of its Texas roots annually.
Blue collar oil, gas, and trucking workers in Pasadena, Deer Park, and the Highlands also help to hold the Texas line and counterbalance the Middle Earth of the Houston inner city, as do the newer, and more Republican, west siders of Harris County.
The mostly conservative engineers, and their fellow travelers, at NASA in Clear Lake (which almost everyone associates Houston with anyway) also provided a space age cherry on top.
Houston’s politics had long been moderate, and no leftward lurch – a la Chicago or New York – was on anyone’s radar as the region entered the twenty-first century.
Even transplant country-clubbers from the north and west wanted safe streets and budgets that made sense, even if they were sometimes socially left of center.
But then came September, 2005.
In that year, Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans, sending up to one hundred thousand refugees into the Texas region, with Houston being Ground Zero.
New Orleans’ population was heavily black and unskilled, and carried a sense of racial grievance and entitled disorder that disposed many of them to treat laws as suggestions; including laws against robbery and murder.
Everyone—including harried apartment managers, relief workers, merchants, and alarmed cops noticed it. Brazen shoplifting, assaults, drug use, and burglaries done by “refugees” guaranteed a lot of off-duty extra employment opportunities for cops.
The Houston area tried to cope, but always seemed to be falling behind.
With their homes washed away, many “refugees” decided to stay where they landed.
There were stories about the Federal government just changing the addresses on the welfare checks without skipping a beat.
Over the next twenty years under the influence of Obama and His Royal Senescence, the cultural drift of American urban societies leftward continued, with Houston being no exception.
The Houston area experienced a massive influx of immigrants from – literally – the entire Earth, and the Democrats tried madly to co-opt all of the above into political support.
This all tipped the political needle.
Houston and Harris County shifted “blue” to the point that Houston was solidly Democrat, with just a few red areas holding out in the unincorporated west and peripheries of Harris County.
The Eisenhower-ish Republican Harris County Commissioner’s Court became majority Democrat.
County Judge Ed Emmett; a very credentialed “establishment” politician who was thought to be everyone’s safe bet, was displaced in a 2018 electoral upset by a young and foxy unknown Hispanic gal named Lina Hidalgo.
Lina – whose call sign is “Dora the Explorer” – looked too good to be true to some, much like other cute Democrat women, and we were not surprised when the predicted “bomb” went off.
She has engaged in weird public behavior and had mental health challenges that would, and still do, define her far more than her administrative or political craft.
Lina has provided no end of most-viewed You Tube video material and social media rage bait, including getting kicked out of the aforementioned rodeo for bad behavior and misconduct at law enforcement funerals.
Harris County’s political aviary would be added to over time by a menagerie of other nameless but often strange characters, both large and small, in a growing local administrative state that was less Texas, and more Lagos, Karachi, or Mexico City.
To include a county treasurer that has had three criminal investigations into her activities.
The same electoral waters also brought a George Soros-supported district attorney in Sean Teare; ascending from within the office after the Democrat party kicked the previous Democrat DA, Kim Ogg, out of office for not being left wing enough and for prosecuting some of Lina Hidalgo’s staffers.
A string of Democrat judges came in, as well, to displace Republicans and finish making Harris County a favorite place to get arrested versus the less progressive “red” counties surrounding it; this according to what Harris County Jail inmates have told my contacts there.
Since then, Ogg has officially supported Republican control of Harris County.
The county liberals have hired other kaiju who I am told make interesting viewing day to day if you are in downtown Houston. Apples don’t fall far from trees, particularly if they are road apples.
Houston and the surrounding area has “grown” to fit the new political and social scenery in the twenty years since Katrina. Certain stretches of Houston resemble Jurassic Park with homeless people and nuts playing the dinosaurs.
Many Houston streets are not safe to drive down on the weekends, with open lawbreaking prevailing as law enforcement goes down public relations rabbit holes trying to look effective even as they are hamstrung.
Mad Max-style driving on the highways is common, and disorder is tolerated or waited out by the cops; hoping that by the time they get to the scene, one half of the mess will go away. Sometimes this works, and sometimes not.
With an entrenched flock of Democrat judges and a like-minded district attorney, and a juror pool that keeps voting for them, nothing’s getting better and enough people know it.
Red counties around Houston continue to do brisk business as people bail out of Harris County while still trying to stay within commute distance of their jobs; which are saved by the fact we’re still Texas and not New York.
And suddenly, it was July 7, 2026.
The disruptive tactics and behavior that suspects in ICE raids, and their supporters, are commonly known for are based around the theory that agents cannot or will not be able to push back effectively for various reasons, and were clearly taught to them by sophisticated actors.
We point out that they are the same crowd that accused protestors on January 6th as insurrectionists, and whom we are sure would have no issue if these were BATFE agents enforcing their favorite gun laws. These folks are about as innocent as a porcupine in a nudist colony.
However, I also was not there and have no insider knowledge of what happened (which I would not put out, even if I did). But I do believe the ICE agents are truthful.
A police raid was done, resistance was given, and instead of turning tail and running, the cops stood their ground and actually meant it when they said to stop, or else.
This shocking example of real law enforcement landed in the Houston punch bowl like the asteroid that got the real dinosaurs.
Houston’s inner-city activists quailed like ducks with Elmer Fudd about to quote scripture on them with his trusty scattergun. You just don’t do stuff like that down there.
Having seen ICE do the sort of policing Houston’s local constabulary have been neutered from, Houston’s liberal array of swamp creatures (along with the national ones) got to work.
The teapot of District Attorney Teare was shortly whistling publicly on this, and insinuating the ICE agents had committed crimes and he was going to prosecute them, or try. If he’s said anything like that about all of the recent shootings in Houston that ICE didn’t do, I missed it.
Almost as quickly, Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz, who has a good “real-cop” pedigree, and whose department stands to lose from a falling out with the Feds, threw cold water on Teare’s teapot when he correctly said HPD “had no jurisdiction” in the matter.
The case was a Federal one and nowhere are Federal agents obliged to opt in local police forces to their incidents.
So too did Houston Mayor John Whitmire. Whitmire, an old school Democrat political moderate, was elected mayor in 2023 and has clashed with some of the newer Democrat politicians in the area; notably Judge Hidalgo.
Both Diaz and Whitmire saw where this was going and wanted no part of it. Whitmire has tried to govern as a businesslike pragmatist despite the national party becoming something out of the Jacobin Club and his being of obviously white colonialist oppressor heritage. You know where that’s headed, soon.
It was at this point that the Democrat machine apparently focused on the situation.
Teare doubled down. Whitmire, who was probably told to go along with it or get cut off at the knees, suddenly sounded more like Teare.
So, can Harris County prosecute the ICE agents?
That hinges on several sticky things. The states and the Federal government have separate jurisdiction. Federal law, and the U.S. constitution, prohibits states from prosecuting Federal agents who are acting in their capacity.
To get around that, Teare and Company may try to claim a given agent was doing something outside of the scope of their duty that violated a state law.
Although this will be obviously specious and may not survive appellate review later, they may not be interested in filing a truthful case. They may only want one that gives them good headlines, and actual truth or justice be damned.
The Harris County DA’s office has been accused recently of several just-such filings. It’s also true that since grand jury testimony is sealed, anything outrageous done in the grand jury room can remain unreported. Democrats are running all of this.
Of course, you have to have access to the scene and the evidence to do a real shooting investigation.
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office has investigators, which serve at the beck and call of mostly liberal assistant district attorneys. They usually conduct case follow-ups instead of first line investigative work, for which they lack the resources, and often the skills, to conduct.
They have no crime scene unit or forensics capability, nor their own evidence room; those assets would have to be borrowed from the Houston Police Department or the corporate-lite version of HPD: the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.
And then, there is the real possibility of their efforts crossing up the actual Federal investigation into the incident, which they really don’t want to risk.
That could see Teare and his fellow travelers raided by ICE or some other agency themselves, and deported to at least the local Federal court house.
But we suspect that the D.A.’s office would be happy to order their pawns to go forward, and deny any wrongdoing if they overstep.
In the most recent news before we go to press, the Texas Rangers have “agreed” to join the investigation at the request of Diaz and Whitmire. Greg Abbott blessed this too.
Tellingly, the Rangers are going to investigate “alongside” the FBI and Homeland Security, which tells me they asked to come in to the effort and were blessed to do so by the Feds.
Whitmire and Diaz now have political cover that Abbott has graciously provided (which makes him look good, as well).
The Rangers are the oldest branch of Texas state law enforcement, and have a great “One Riot, One Ranger” history, and have been state investigators that are well respected inside and outside of the state in modern times.
We will now continue to watch Harris County for the Left’s next move. The presence of the Rangers alongside the others may forestall judicial adventurism by Sean Teare’s office.
Nonetheless, we wonder if the Left thinks all of us aren’t taking notes on how poorly they have treated our rule of law, and police, both inside and outside of Texas when they have had the power to choose.
Houston, Texas also provides a cautionary tale of what uncontrolled immigration, cultures other than Texas culture, and liberal Democrats can do to a state—even one as stereotypically red as Texas.
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Mark Deuce has had a life-long career in community law enforcement. He is the author of Deuces Wild for TTP.
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