HOUSTON — “We are calling for a full, transparent, independent investigation into all of this,” Ronaldo Salgado, the son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, told a rally of hundreds of people here July 19. They were protesting the killing of his father at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Construction worker Lorenzo Salgado was shot dead as he was driving to work July 7.
“I really, really hoped that my dad would be the last person that this would happen to,” Ronaldo Salgado told the rally at Ervan Chew Park. “But you saw what happened less than a week later. Out there in Maine, there is a young 3-year-old child who saw the worst of the worst.” Salgado was referring to the child and wife of Joan Sebastian Guerrero who saw his body on the street after he’d been shot dead by ICE officers in Biddeford, Maine, July 13. Guerrero was a cleaner at a veterinary clinic and food delivery driver originally from Colombia.
Ronaldo Salgado’s brother, Lorenzo Jr., said he found out his father had died while on an airplane on the way to visit him. “An hour into the flight, I opened the same article that reported that a person had been shot,” Lorenzo Jr. told the rally. Then, he added, “the article updated to read, ‘shot, killed.’”
Both brothers thanked everyone for joining the protest and urged them to fight to prevent future ICE shootings. “The government fears people coming together,” Ronaldo Salgado said.
Two days earlier dozens of construction workers joined a car caravan to protest Salgado’s killing. Several drove in white vans like the one Salgado was driving when he was gunned down. They went to a memorial set up to honor him at the site of his death in the predominantly Mexican community of East End Houston.
Sara Vallejo lives a few blocks from the memorial. She told the Militant that people come here from all over the city every day to honor Salgado.
On the day of the shooting, “I was at home and saw it happening on Facebook,” she said. “I saw him pleading for his life. They had him trapped like he was an animal. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen in my neighborhood.
“People are afraid to take their kids to school or go to the store. But you can only have so much force. In this neighborhood there are also people who are coming out, who are not afraid. This can be the force that can make a difference,” she said.
At the July 19 rally Gabbie Martinez spoke to Socialist Workers Party member Gerardo Sánchez. “It is not just happening to Mexicans,” she told him. “ICE just arrested a Russian who was studying here.”
“The death of Salgado shows the necessity of a union-led fight for amnesty for all immigrants without papers in the U.S.,” Sánchez said. “This is essential to unify the working class for the coming fights against the bosses and the government.”
“Without pressuring the government and the mayor nothing is going to change,” Martinez said. “Everyone needs to come out to these rallies.”
Martinez was one of five people there to get a Militant subscription. Several copies of Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke were sold from the campaign table set up by SWP members.