Shoot First, Smear Later
Killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo wasn’t enough—now comes the Trump administration’s campaign to assassinate his character.
THERE IS A FAMILIAR PATTERN to how the Trump administration responds when its immigration enforcement agents commit a high-profile killing: They move swiftly to malign the victim.
Usually, this involves dredging up menacing pictures. Often it means pointing to past, unrelated crimes. In the case of Alex Pretti, it meant surfacing video of a separate confrontation he had with ICE officers before he was fatally shot.
Now, following the killing last week of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE, we find ourselves in this cycle once again.
Reports emerged on Wednesday that the FBI, which is leading an investigation of the confrontation in which Araujo was shot to death in Houston, claimed to have found potential “controlled substances” in Araujo’s van. According to a search-warrant application approved by a judge on Tuesday and obtained by the New York Times, an FBI special agent inspecting the van sometime after the fatal incident saw eight “plastic bags with what appeared to be a white crystal-like substance”—packaging supposedly “consistent with methamphetamine.” The news was quickly amplified by right-wing media, which posted photos from the warrant application showing the small bags of powder.
Alarm bells went off immediately. It’s unusual for an application like this to be unsealed so swiftly, as the Times notes. And knowing the Trump administration’s history of vilifying its victims, it was hard to escape the suspicion this was orchestrated to insinuate Araujo was not an innocent working-class immigrant father but rather a . . . drug addict? A drug pusher? A bad guy somehow deserving of the bullets?
It strained credulity. And, sure enough,