From a Latino to ICE: Stop Disappearing Us. Stop Killing Us.

By Mr. Alvarez | Climate Change Community LLC

Say His Name: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

On the morning of July 7, 2026, at about 6:50 a.m., a 52-year-old man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Canal Street, in Houston’s East End — a historically Latino neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood where I come from, the kind of neighborhood where the day starts before the sun because there is work to be done and family to feed.

He was on his way to work. Construction. Building homes. His son Ronaldo said his father had lived in this country for 35 years and was trying to obtain a work permit. Public records searches found no criminal record in Texas. The ICE vehicles were unmarked. His family believes he thought he was about to be robbed — a working man protecting his tools, the way working men do.

ICE says he “weaponized his vehicle.” His family, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), FIEL Houston, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and elected officials are demanding an independent investigation and the release of all footage — body cam, dash cam, dispatch logs, everything. As of this writing, no footage has been released. And the man riding with him that morning, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, was detained on the spot; for days his family did not even know where he was being held.

This letter is addressed to the Department of Homeland Security, to ICE, and to every hand on that machinery. I am angry. I will not pretend otherwise. But I am going to speak to you the way my people speak — with dignity, with fire, and with a mirror.

You Have Family, No?

I know many of you inside those agencies don’t want to hear this, but at some point every one of us must reflect. So let me start with the simplest question there is:

You have family, no?

That is the point — family. It is one of the strongest forces on Earth, without a doubt. When you have a family, or families knit close together, you have a condition that is virtually unbeatable. That is what Lorenzo Salgado Araujo had. A wife. Sons. Dozens of men who worked alongside him chasing the same dream your grandparents chased. His son stood in front of cameras and said his father “did not deserve to die. He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline.”

We Latinos are not strong because of pain, death, hurt, or abuse — we are simply used to them. We are used to emotional abuse and much of the physical kind too. We still stand. But do not confuse our endurance with consent.

We are indignant at what you are doing to us. We demand absolute respect for our human dignity. We are not animals. And we are not all fucking criminals.

That goes for the anti-science crowd too, the ones who deny the emergency burning outside all our windows. Contempt for immigrants and contempt for evidence grow from the same root: the refusal to look reality in the face.

A Pattern, Not an Accident

Lorenzo’s killing did not happen in a vacuum. It is the second fatal shooting by federal immigration agents in Texas since 2025. Before him there was Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, an American citizen born and raised in San Antonio, shot repeatedly in South Padre Island — camera footage never clearly supported the official account, and a grand jury declined to indict. In Minneapolis this past January, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed during protests; video footage contradicted or complicated the official stories in both cases. In Chicago, Marimar Martinez was shot five times. Each time the same script: an agency statement, a disputed account, a family left without answers, a community left in fear.

LULAC’s president said it plainly: this is not an isolated event. It is a pattern. And patterns are policy wearing a mask.

The Earth Has No Walls

Now hear the deeper truth, the one that outlasts every administration and every enforcement operation:

The Earth has no divisions of walls when it comes to the Climate and Ecological Emergency. That is something not even you can change.

Wildfire smoke does not check papers. Drought does not respect a border fence. The heat that killed workers in fields from Texas to California last summer did not ask anyone’s immigration status. We are in a situation where the most viable future of the human species is in dire danger — and we are spending our energy, our budgets, and our manhood on hunting the people who pour our concrete, pick our food, and build our homes.

We need to evolve if we are going to deal with what is coming for us.

We can, working together, decide that tackling the Climate and Ecological Emergency is where real energy should reside — even that “manly” energy so many seem desperate to prove. Because I assure you: confronting this emergency will require real men and real women. Just ask the women, children, young adults, and immigrants. They already know. They know from experience — from the Dry Corridor to the Rio Grande, they have been living the climate crisis while others debated whether it exists.

History will not be kind to nations that mistook cruelty for strength. What looks today like a “solution,” or even a band-aid, will be revealed by history’s future as unjust damage done to ourselves — the way history judges every country that contemplated erasing a people.

Quotes for the Mirror

I don’t claim to be a great scholar of history. But I have spent a lifetime studying transformation — mine and my community’s. Quotes don’t make you wise; they sharpen the wisdom you’re already fighting for. These are my own, and I offer them to anyone inside that agency willing to look in the mirror tonight:

You cannot pour a new world from an old, cracked vessel. Remake the vessel first.
Transformation doesn’t wait for permission. It waits for decision.
The hardest border you will ever cross runs straight through your own heart.
Comfort is the enemy dressed as a friend. Growth never knocks politely.
You don’t find your best self. You forge it — strike by strike, day by day.
Every excuse you keep is a brick in the wall between you and who you could become.
Change your inner weather, and no storm outside can claim you.
The revolution the world is waiting for begins in the mirror.
Fear is a rented room. Stop paying for it.
A seed doesn’t apologize for the dirt. It uses it.
Discipline is self-love with calluses.
You are not stuck. You are standing still. Those are not the same thing.
Stop negotiating with your old self. It will always vote for yesterday.
Transform like the clave: steady, relentless, alive — never rushing, never surrendering the beat.
Your wounds are not your identity. They are your curriculum.
Nobody rises by accident. Elevation is a decision repeated daily.
The person you are avoiding becoming is the person the world needs most.
Suffering visits everyone. Transformation only visits those who answer the door.
You can inherit your circumstances, but you must author your character.
Small habits are quiet revolutions. Keep them, and they will keep you.
Courage is not the absence of trembling. It is moving forward while you tremble.
The old you fights hardest right before it loses. Don’t mistake resistance for a stop sign.

Look in the Mirror of Your Life

All of us look into the mirror of our lives — we see family, friends, influences, the voices we have let in. Too many of us are shaped not by the great thinkers of the past, whose wisdom we could weigh and question, but by voices we are not permitted to criticize. Orders. Talking points. A chain of command that outsources the conscience.

So I ask every agent, every officer, every official reading this to ask the only question that matters:

Is this absolutely the life I want to be living?

Is unmarked vehicles at 6:50 in the morning, in a neighborhood full of grandmothers and lunch pails, the story you want to tell your children? Is a man bleeding out on Canal Street on his way to build somebody’s house the legacy you are constructing, strike by strike, day by day?

What We Demand

We are not asking for pity. We are demanding what the law, the Constitution, and basic human decency already require:

A full, independent investigation into the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — not the agency investigating itself.
The preservation and public release of all evidence: body camera, dash camera, bystander video, dispatch logs. Everything.
An end to unmarked-vehicle enforcement stops in our neighborhoods. A working man cannot comply with an authority he cannot identify.
Transparency and due process for detained passengers and witnesses, whose families deserve to know where their loved ones are.
Respect for the human dignity of every person — documented or not, citizen or not. Dignity is not conferred by paperwork.

This Does Not Last Forever

Understand this last thing, and understand it well. Things like this do not last forever. History shows — over and over, from every empire that ever mistook a badge for a blank check — that non-violent accountability always follows. Not revenge. Accountability. Courts. Records. Testimony. Memory. The long, patient, unbreakable rhythm of a people who refuse to be erased.

We move like the clave: steady, relentless, alive. Never rushing. Never surrendering the beat.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a husband, a father, a builder of homes, and our brother. Say his name. And then look in the mirror.

Que descanse en poder, hermano.

Buena Gente – Los Van Van