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HOUSTON — The city of Houston is just thinking about waking up at the top of the 6 a.m. hour on this Tuesday morning in July. But on Canal Street, one of the key east-west arteries zipping through the heart of the historic, hard-working East End, the day has already begun.
Pickup trucks blaze by, their tail winds spawning a pre-dawn breeze that flutters the foil balloons and Mexican flags tethered to a utility pole in front of the site where, exactly two weeks earlier — in the 6 a.m. hour on a Tuesday — Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Some of the vehicles slow in respect, drivers’ eyes taking in the rows of prayer candles that flickered through the night, as they make their morning commute on what will be another heat-emergency day.
At 6:07 a.m., a pair of white vans drive by, nose to taillight. These handyman vans are ubiquitous in the East End. According to data obtained from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles through a public records request, more than 1,600 white vans are registered in the ZIP codes that comprise the Greater East End.
Yet driving one in this neighborhood put Salgado Araujo in the crosshairs of federal agents.
And that, according to Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia, the former county sheriff who now represents the East End, amounts to “unconstitutional profiling.”
“The technical term is, I’m pissed,” Garcia told Straight Arrow. “Anybody who may be a roofer, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a plumber, an electrician, driving a white van that happens to be Hispanic — there’s got to be no doubt that they’re getting into their vans looking over their shoulders.”
One every 2 minutes and 47 seconds
On Tuesday, July 21, Straight Arrow journalists stood at the corner of Canal Street and Wayside Drive, recording the number of white vans driving by the intersection where two weeks earlier DHS agents began chasing Salgado Araujo’s white van.
Between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m., Straight Arrow counted 43 unmarked white vans passing by. They were not the most common vehicle; Houston loves an F-150 as much as the rest of the nation. But with one van popping up every 2 minutes and 47 seconds, on average, they made up a significant portion of the early morning traffic.
Federal investigators cited the presence of two white vans at a residential address as a primary reason for pursuing Salgado Araujo.
“After receiving a credible tip from our law enforcement partners, our officers conducted surveillance on a target’s address,” a Department of Homeland Security official wrote in a July 10 statement. “Weeks prior to the incident, they noted two white vans at the property. On July 7, officers were almost at the target’s address when they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target. Officers then initiated the vehicle stop.”
DHS later confirmed that Salgado Araujo was not the agency’s intended target.
Erik Ibarra, a 46-year-old entrepreneur and lifelong East End resident, said this surveillance logic turns the neighborhood’s everyday rhythm into a reason for suspicion.
“My brother drives a white van,” Ibarra told Straight Arrow, as he stood in front of the memorial to Salgado Araujo, offering his respects. It was his fifth or sixth trip to the site, he said. He can’t get it out of his mind.
Ibarra stood at the memorial for several minutes shortly after 8 a.m., helping a group of three women find a place for the prayer candles they brought with them, troubleshooting the small, purple lighter someone had left on a railing.
“This could have been all of our dads,” Ibarra said. “This is us. Like, this is our story.”
Salgado Araujo was 52 years old — only six years older than Ibarra. Having lost both his father and stepfather within weeks of each other this spring, Ibarra said the sudden loss of Salgado Araujo, himself a father of three, resonates deeply.
“Both my dads … got to be old men,” he said. “And this guy was in his prime.”
A tool of the trade
Federal officials have not officially confirmed the make and model of the vehicle Salgado Araujo was driving. Nor have DHS officials responded to several requests from Straight Arrow for more information about the van, or for further comment. However, photographs and video evidence from the scene point to a white Ford Transit — a mainstay for independent contractors like Salgado Araujo.
It’s the best-selling van in America, according to Ford Motor Co., which set an annual record in 2025 by selling 161,797 Transit vans. And in Houston’s East End, data obtained by Straight Arrow shows they are remarkably popular. Of the 1,669 white vans registered to East End ZIP Codes, 787 — or 47% — are Ford Transits, according to records from the Texas DMV.
Salgado Araujo’s van was more than his transportation; like many other East End workers, it was a key to his livelihood.
“One of my dad’s biggest fears was for his work van and tools to be stolen,” Salgado Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, told ABC News days after the shooting. “It has happened before that his work van was stolen, and he never got those tools back. He got his van, but no tools. So ever since then, he’s been cautious about where he leaves his van, where he drives, who’s around him.”
Salgado Araujo was not alone in that. The fear of aggressive stops by unmarked vehicles is shared across the neighborhood.
“You have an aggressive-driving vehicle with blacked-out windows, you don’t know who it is,” said Garcia, the county commissioner who spent 23 years as a Houston Police Department officer before serving as Harris County sheriff from 2009 to 2015.
“It’s understandable why someone that is being approached by these aggressive-driving vehicles may react in a very defensive manner,” he told Straight Arrow. “What ICE is doing is destroying [community trust] in real time.”
‘No probable cause’
The community has certainly noticed.
Jorge Gonzalez did not witness the shooting, but the aftermath hit him hard. He watched the morning Salgado Araujo was killed, as federal agents combed his yard for bullet casings.
The following morning, as Gonzalez stood in his front yard on Canal Street, just a couple doors down from where the memorial was beginning to bloom, a white van drove past.
“See, when they see Mexicans driving a van like that, because they got windows, and they see a lot of workers, they just,” he said, smacking his hands together with a loud clap. Over the past few months, Gonzalez told Straight Arrow, he has seen a growing number of unmarked vehicles waiting at the two gas stations on the corner of Wayside and Canal. Their target, he said: White vans.
In public statements following the shooting, DHS representatives claimed officers initiated fire after Salgado Araujo attempted to use his van to run over an agent.
Gonzalez rejected that narrative.
“Now they’re trying to say that he tried to run over the ICE agent,” said Gonzalez. “That’s a lie.”
To Gonzalez, Salgado Araujo’s death feels unjust.
To Garcia, it is unconstitutional.
“If ICE has been directed to look for white vans, that has been proven to be unconstitutional profiling,” Garcia told Straight Arrow. “There is no probable cause … that if you pull over a white van, you’re going to come across an undocumented individual.”
In short, he said, the approach to stopping one of 1,669 similar vehicles in an area, while driving down a main street, is “just ridiculous.”
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