The Border Week: Paxton Backs a Border "Invasion" Resolution, the U.S. Attorney Details the Salgado Shooting, and Two ICE Killings Reveal a Pattern

Featured resolution: Paxton backs a congressional bill on states' border "invasion" powers

H.Res.50 is the congressional resolution Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threw his office's weight behind Wednesday, a measure sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, that would affirm states' constitutional authority under Article I, Section 10 to exclude unlawfully present foreign nationals when facing an "invasion," with the federal government's Article IV duty to protect states from invasion serving as a backstop when Washington fails to act. That theory underpins Texas's Senate Bill 4, the 2023 law letting state and local police arrest people for illegal entry or reentry and letting state judges order their deportation, a law a federal judge enjoined before the Fifth Circuit reversed that injunction in April on a 10-7 en banc vote that turned on the plaintiffs' standing rather than the law's merits. "H.Res.50 serves as a vindication of Texas's actions to defend its borders and a repudiation of the Biden-era legal attacks against our state," Paxton said, while Arrington framed the measure as insurance against a future administration reversing course on enforcement. The resolution carries no legal force of its own and would not resolve the standing question the Fifth Circuit left open.

U.S. Attorney's account: the preliminary law enforcement narrative of the Salgado shooting

One shot is what killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on July 7 in Houston, U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz of the Southern District of Texas said in a statement Thursday laying out his office's preliminary account of the incident. Federal officers were looking for two Guatemalan men known to drive a white van and subject to deportation, Reitz said. After an initial attempt to stop a similar van ended when its occupants fled by U-turn, officers encountered the van again later that morning and surrounded it. Two of four officers got out and ordered the driver to park, and preliminary information indicates the driver shifted the van into reverse and then forward while an officer stood partially inside or immediately next to it, at which point one officer fired the single shot that struck Salgado Araujo, who died at the hospital despite officers' attempts to render aid. Reitz said officers also saw small bags of a white, crystal-like substance in plain view inside the van, prompting the FBI to execute a search warrant on the vehicle a day before his statement in connection with possible narcotics offenses. He stressed the account draws no final conclusions while his office, the FBI, DHS and state and local partners continue investigating.

Two shootings: ICE's pattern of disputed "weaponized vehicle" claims in Texas

16 months is how far apart federal immigration agents killed two Texas men under strikingly similar circumstances, first Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, during a traffic stop in South Padre Island on March 15, 2025, then Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, in Houston on July 7. In both cases officers said the men "weaponized" their vehicles against them while surviving witnesses disputed that account, the Texas Tribune reported. Martinez's killing went unreported for nearly a year until a public records lawsuit by the watchdog group American Oversight exposed it in February, and a Cameron County grand jury later declined to indict the agents involved. His friend and the only civilian witness, Joshua Orta, gave a sworn statement contradicting the agents' account before dying in a car crash in February, a death his family attributes partly to the grief and anger he carried after watching Martinez die. In the Salgado Araujo case, more than a dozen attorneys and former law enforcement officials who reviewed pursuit footage for the Texas Tribune said the agents' use of unmarked vehicles, aggressive driving tactics and a shot fired at a moving van broke with standard policing practice and possibly the law, while Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has vowed to pursue charges if warranted. Both cases remain open, and unlike the Martinez shooting, which drew no criminal charges after 16 months, investigators in Houston have moved faster, executing a search warrant on Salgado Araujo's van within a week of his death.