![\"Aaron](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Image-1-1-1000x750.jpg\")
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Michael Adkison\/Houston Public Media<\/p>\n
Aaron Reitz, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, pictured on Aug. 20, 2026.<\/p>\n
Two days after the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by a federal immigration officer in Houston on July 7, Aaron Reitz was sworn in<\/a> as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas. Any decision on federally prosecuting the shooting now goes through him.<\/p>\n In an all-encompassing interview with Houston Public Media, Reitz said he would not shut the door entirely on prosecuting the officer who pulled the trigger<\/a>, who has not been publicly identified, calling such a decision “something that no federal law enforcement officer, that no prosecutor, that no U.S. Attorney, that no attorney general would ever commit to.”<\/p>\n “On the one hand, it is true we\u2019ll follow the law wherever it may lead, as the case may be,” Reitz said. “But I back the blue. I support DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and Border Patrol, Customs and Border Protection. These are our federal law enforcement officers doing their best to advance law, in order to do justice and to make America safe again, and I think that they should be free to police as the law allows them to do, and that they should be free from threats or movements that try to make it difficult for them to do their job.”<\/p>\n Sign up for the Hello, Houston!<\/a> daily newsletter to get local reports like this delivered directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n Reitz was quietly tapped for the role in July. In his telling, he was appointed the interim U.S. Attorney by Todd Blanche, the Attorney General of the United States, on July 9. That same day, he said, the judges in the Southern District selected him for the role, making him a permanent U.S. Attorney rather than an interim one.<\/p>\n The route, though permissible under U.S. law, is not the traditional route for U.S. Attorneys, who are usually appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Reitz, who had previously been called a “MAGA attorney” by President Donald Trump, said he has not spoken to the president since becoming a federal prosecutor.<\/p>\n Click here for more inDepth features.<\/a><\/p>\n Reitz also inherited an office with a national spotlight on it, in the aftermath of Salgado Araujo’s killing. The shooting occurred during what ICE called a “targeted enforcement operation<\/a>.” A spokesperson for ICE claimed in a statement that Salgado Araujo tried to ram officers with his vehicle and one of them fired in self-defense. The three passengers, who were in Salgado Araujo\u2019s vehicle at the time, have all refuted ICE’s account<\/a>, according to their attorneys. The New York Times later reported that none of the men in the vehicle were ICE’s intended targets. <\/p>\n RELATED: Second witness to fatal Houston ICE shooting released from federal custody<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n “It is a massive issue, and it rightfully has elicited a lot of public concern,” Reitz said. “And I felt a responsibility under my oath, under my office, to be transparent with the public where I was able to.”<\/p>\n A week after his appointment, Reitz shared a video on social media<\/a>, sharing what he called “preliminary information” in the case. In the video, Reitz stated that “preliminary information indicates [Salgado Araujo] shifted the van into reverse, then forward again, while an officer was partially inside the van or immediately next to it.”<\/p>\n Reitz also raised a concern that “officers saw in plain view several small bags of a white, crystal-like substance inside the van.” He said the FBI was executing a search warrant <\/a>on the van “in connection with possible narcotics trafficking and drug offenses.” Days before, the search warrant for the van was unsealed publicly with photos depicting roughly five plastic bags inside the van.<\/p>\n Ultimately, public officials, including Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia and Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, have said that the bags did not contain drugs but rather an electrolyte powder. <\/p>\n “I stand by what I said in the video,” Reitz told Houston Public Media. “I stand by my subsequent statements, now that we have the results back that it was not meth. We haven’t hidden from that. I think that you won’t find a U.S. Attorney who is as transparent as I was in this moment of public controversy, and so I think we did the right thing by telling people what happened.”<\/p>\n He also stated that the search warrant was never supposed to be under seal. In his telling, the filing was submitted to the court clerk without the seal, and a clerk sealed it. At that point, Reitz’s office then unsealed the file they said never was supposed to be sealed in the first place.<\/p>\n Officials and legal analysts have raised concerns about making the search warrant public so soon in the case. Teare said on Houston Matters on July 17<\/a> that he’d never seen a search warrant unsealed so soon, adding that “there was no evidentiary value to be gained from it anyway.”<\/p>\n “The purpose of not filing it under seal \u2014 and then taking that corrective administrative action to ensure that it was not under seal \u2014 was an exercise of my judgment, in which I felt that it was, again, in the spirit of transparency and honesty and just total openness with the public that we wanted the public to know what we were doing,” Reitz said. “This idea that it was unsealed for some nefarious purpose is wrong. It\u2019s absurd. It is legally incorrect, and it is used to drive a false narrative about what federal law enforcement is doing here.”<\/p>\n Prior to serving as the U.S. attorney, Reitz had stirred controversy as he campaigned to be elected Texas Attorney General, an office he previously worked in under Ken Paxton. Earlier this year, Reitz had called to revoke the citizenship status<\/a> of Texas state Rep. Gene Wu, a Democrat, when he stated that marginalized groups “share the same oppressor.”<\/p>\n