Small bags inside a van whose driver was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent contained salt, not drugs, said a lawyer for a witness, contradicting federal agents.
Investigators with the F.B.I. got a warrant to search the van on Tuesday after telling a federal judge they believed that a “crystal-like” substance in the plastic bags might be methamphetamine.
On Thursday, Ruby Powers, a lawyer for Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, who is the victim’s younger brother and was a passenger in the van, said in a statement that “after consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this was granulated salt.”
Like other construction workers, her client and his brother would mix the salt into water and add lemon as a kind of homemade energy drink during their days working in the hot Houston sun, Ms. Powers said in an interview.
“He puts it in a water bottle and makes his own Gatorade, an electrolyte mix,” she added.
The Harris County district attorney, Sean Teare, also cast doubt on the presence of drugs Thursday. “Based on what we’ve learned about the passengers, it’s inconsistent that drugs were in the van,” he said in a statement.
The drug debate obscured, for the moment, the circumstances that led to the fatal shooting of the van’s driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, by an ICE agent.
Late Thursday, Aaron Reitz, the newly appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, released a video statement that provided new details in the official account of the encounter.
Mr. Reitz said that two vehicles, each with two ICE agents inside, turned on their police lights and tried to pull over the white van being driven by Mr. Salgado Araujo. “The aliens then fled, conducting a rapid U-turn and hopping a median to get away,” he said. “The agents chose not to pursue. Later that morning, the agents came across the van again.”
“This time the agents successfully surrounded the vehicle,” Mr. Reitz said. Two of the agents got out of their vehicles and told Mr. Salgado Araujo to put the van in park, he said. “Preliminary information indicates the driver shifted the van into reverse, then forward again, while an officer was partially inside the van or immediately next to it.”
Mr. Reitz said that during the confrontation, though the statement did not make clear exactly when, “one of the officers fired a single shot,” striking Mr. Salgado Araujo.
The prosecutor’s account could not be independently verified by video obtained by The New York Times. Two of the men in the van told a local congresswoman that the officers did not identify themselves as they approached the van, and that the shot had been fired through a front passenger window.
Mr. Reitz mentioned that the agents observed the plastic bags, believing they could contain drugs, but he did not resolve the question of what investigators have determined about their contents.
A spokesman for the Houston field office of the F.B.I. declined to comment on Ms. Powers’s statement and said the agency had no plans to release results of any tests of the substance.
The back-and-forth over the bags — and the prosecutor’s statement — came after the unusual revelation of the F.B.I. search warrant application on Wednesday. Usually such applications are filed under seal, but this time the application was filed publicly.
Pictures of the small bags were included in the warrant application, along with a description of their contents as a “white crystal-like substance.”
Mixing salt into water as a means of staying hydrated is common among outdoor workers, advocates said.
“We have heard from workers that a lot of construction workers aren’t buying brand-name Gatorades, etc., but making and bringing their own hydrating drinks — lemonade with salt, coconut water, yogurt drinks,” Laura Perez-Boston, organizing director with the Workers Defense Project Fund, said in an email. “Many drinks and foods hydrate the body.”
Mr. Salgado Araujo, who is from Mexico and had lived in the United States for 35 years, was heading to a construction job with his brother and two other workers on the morning of July 7 when agents began pursuing them while searching for a person who was not in the van. Federal officials have said Mr. Salgado Araujo tried to evade arrest and rammed an ICE vehicle.
Local law enforcement officials have said they have struggled to conduct an independent inquiry because they have not been given access to the evidence being collected by federal investigators.
Local officials have expressed concern that the three surviving passengers in the van, who were witnesses to the shooting but do not have legal status in the United States, could be deported. All are in federal detention.