Federal immigration shootings kill civilians amid Trump deportation crackdown

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 after officers tried to stop his vehicle near Canal Street and Wayside Drive in the East End and Magnolia Park area. The FBI opened an investigation, and calls grew for an independent review as DHS said Araujo ignored commands and attempted to ram an officer, who fired in self-defense.

The Houston case landed in the middle of a broader pattern that has put armed immigration enforcement under a national microscope. The New York Times reported that federal agents had fired on at least 21 people, many of them in cars, during President Trump’s deportation crackdown, and at least five of those people were killed, including three U.S. citizens. A Wall Street Journal investigation identified 13 instances in which immigration agents fired at or into civilian vehicles since July 2025, leaving at least eight people shot and at least two dead; at least five of the people shot were U.S. citizens.

NBC News reported that federal immigration officers shot 14 people from September 2025 to February 2026 as the Department of Homeland Security accelerated deportation operations around the country. The Trace went further, saying it had identified 26 shootings by immigration agents since Trump’s operations began last year, with seven people killed and another 14 injured. It also found 46 additional incidents in which agents held bystanders, protesters or others at gunpoint under questionable circumstances.

The public record has exposed a recurring accountability gap. In several cases, video and witness accounts have appeared to conflict with DHS’s self-defense explanations, raising questions about when agents are authorized to shoot and how those decisions are reviewed. In Minneapolis, the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good drew particular attention after a judge later cited discrepancies between official DHS statements and video evidence in a related civil lawsuit.

Those disputes have shadowed Trump’s city-by-city immigration blitz, which has sent federal officers into neighborhoods far from the border and placed vehicle stops, fast-moving arrests and armed encounters at the center of enforcement. The result has been a series of shootings that have killed civilians, including U.S. citizens, while the standards governing the use of deadly force have remained largely out of public view.