Harris County DA Sean Teare on the Death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo

Sean Teare serves as the Harris County District Attorney in Houston, a Democrat elected to oversee prosecutions across the county. Before taking office, he spent close to twenty years in law enforcement, including more than a decade teaching cadets at the Houston Police Department Academy. That background now places him at the center of two competing investigations into a federal agency operating largely outside his jurisdiction.

He told CBS News this week the vehicle-stop tactics used by ICE agents differ from the training he gave officers throughout his career.

Two men died within one week. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died on July 7 in Houston's East End, shot by an ICE agent during an operation the agency described as targeted. Araujo had no connection to the intended target. Days later, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, also unconnected to the person agents sought. Neither agent wore a body camera. Both shootings happened during traffic stops. Video obtained by the Associated Press appears to show the car carrying the 26-year-old Colombian man as it's being stopped, and once the vehicle has been stopped, agents can be seen pulling the body from the vehicle and laying it on the ground.

Teare's office issued nearly twenty subpoenas while building an independent investigation. Federal authorities withheld the name of the agent involved in the Houston shooting for a full week after the incident. Teare said during an interview in his Houston office that his office has "not received a single name of an ICE agent from ICE that was involved in that shooting." He added that his office is "more than prepared to file criminal charges against the people, regardless of whether or not they are federal agents or civilians," should the evidence support wrongdoing.

The federal response so far centers on a different question entirely. The FBI has said it is investigating the Houston incident as a potential assault on a federal agent, not as a fatal shooting of a civilian. The Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General leads the parallel federal probe into the shooting itself.

Teare attributes the shootings to one of two causes, either inadequate training among agents or a deliberate effort to manufacture situations that justify lethal force, though he declined to choose between the two.

Maine Senator Angus King draws a direct line between the shootings and enforcement targets. "This is a broad sweep with people with a quota. They've been told they have to arrest 2000 people a day by the White House," King said, calling the instruction "a terrible way... to give law enforcement." Surveillance-based enforcement requires time to build a case against a specific person. A traffic stop produces an arrest immediately, regardless of who ends up in the car.

Quota-driven policing carries a documented history in other areas of law enforcement, including traffic tickets, where departments relying on numeric targets over individual judgment produce worse outcomes. Teare says the same incentive applies now, with lethal force attached to the outcome instead of a citation.

Houston and Maine are no longer isolated cases. Hennepin County, Minnesota prosecutors have spent months investigating the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, killed in January. Teare said he stayed in contact with the Hennepin County attorney, and Minnesota prosecutors announced they had obtained long-withheld evidence from the federal government in those shootings. Two states, four deaths, and the same evidence dispute repeating between local prosecutors and federal agencies.

ICE paused most vehicle stops on Tuesday following the two shootings and announced plans to expand body camera use across its enforcement operations. Tom Homan, the administration's border czar, described the pause as temporary rather than a policy change.

President Trump overturned that pause on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after it took effect. He wrote on social media that ICE agents should resume the practice, calling traffic stops one of the agency's most effective tools and urging officers to continue their arrest numbers. The reversal returns agents to the same tactic used in both fatal shootings. The shift back to traffic stops does nothing to resolve the questions investigators are still trying to answer about the two shootings that prompted the pause in the first place.

DHS says its agents acted out of concern for public safety in both incidents. The families of both men dispute this account. Local investigators in Houston examine possible charges including murder, criminally negligent homicide, and tampering with evidence. No charges exist in either case.

Local investigators depend on evidence controlled by the same federal agency under investigation, in Texas and in Minnesota alike. The families of Salgado Araujo and Guerrero wait for answers on a timeline nobody has announced, while the tactic behind both deaths has already resumed.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

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