The Border Week: A Witness Walks Free, a Drug Claim Collapses, Birth Tourism

A Federal Judge Orders the Release of the Only Surviving Witness to the Salgado Araujo Shooting

48 hours is how long the Department of Homeland Security had to release Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego from immigration detention under an order U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison issued Monday evening, which also required that authorities free him in a public place and give his attorneys three hours' notice. Rojas Pliego, a Mexican citizen, was one of three passengers in the van Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving when an ICE agent shot him on July 7. He has lived in the United States since 1998, has children and stepchildren who are U.S. citizens, and has no criminal record. Because the agents carried no body cameras and no dashcam footage exists, he and the two other passengers are the only known witnesses to the shooting, and two of them have said agents rammed the van before the shot was fired, contradicting the government's account that Salgado Araujo tried to run down an agent. Ellison had blocked Rojas Pliego's deportation less than a week earlier. In Monday's order he wrote that the government may not detain noncitizens without "individualized justification" merely because they entered the country unlawfully, and required DHS to seek a pre-detention hearing before taking him back into custody. He also noted that the petition was "one of hundreds of similar petitions," a figure that matches the 1,399 habeas filings the Western and Southern Districts of Texas logged in June alone. Raed Gonzalez, one of Rojas Pliego's attorneys, said the judge could have settled for ordering a bond hearing in immigration court, "Thankfully, this one knew what he was doing." Petitions from the other two witnesses, Daniel Tirado Pantoja and the victim's brother Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, remain pending.

The Substance Federal Agents Cited in a Search Warrant Was Not a Drug

One search warrant, unsealed by federal agents in an unusual move, claimed there may have been methamphetamine inside Salgado Araujo's van. Testing has since shown the substance was not an illicit drug, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare and U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia said. The warrant had given the government its only public suggestion of criminality inside the van, and it surfaced after officials had already declined to release the name of the agent who fired. Teare's office says federal investigators are withholding evidence in the case, including that name, which leaves local prosecutors unable to run their own investigation into a killing that took place in their jurisdiction.

Eleven Charged in the Deaths of Seven Migrants Sealed Inside a Rail Container

Seven migrants died after smugglers sealed them inside a train shipping container in the Texas heat, and prosecutors have now charged eleven people over the deaths, U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons of the Western District of Texas announced. Six of the bodies, including that of a 14-year-old boy, turned up in a rail yard in Laredo when a Union Pacific worker saw a leg protruding from a container. The seventh was left for dead near the tracks in San Antonio. The group boarded the train in Del Rio expecting to reach San Antonio. When smugglers opened the door there, a man fell out, so they shut it again and fled, and the train continued to Laredo the next day. The container sat stacked on another, could not be opened from inside, and had no ventilation or cooling as temperatures ran between 88 and 92 degrees. The Webb County medical examiner suspects hyperthermia. "One of those individuals frantically contacted their family as they were dying from the sweltering heat in that container," Simmons said. The migrants, from Honduras and Mexico, had paid the equivalent of $1,500 to $10,000 each to be moved into the interior of the country. Agents arrested one defendant in Del Rio on May 12 and eight more across central and south Texas last week, while a man and a woman remain at large. Four of those charged are U.S. citizens, two are permanent residents, and five were in the country without legal status. The two counts, conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death and aiding and abetting the same, each carry a maximum of life in prison.

Paxton Opens a Birth Tourism Investigation into Two Rio Grande Valley Hospitals

Two hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley are under investigation by Attorney General Ken Paxton over what his office calls potentially unlawful birth tourism schemes, after Spanish-language billboards near the border advertised childbirth services to expectant mothers in Mexico. Mission Regional Medical Center promoted "Birth Packages in South Texas" and pointed prospective patients to the website havemybabyinTEXAS.com, according to the announcement, and Knapp Medical Center in Weslaco has also been named. Neither hospital has been charged, and the office has not alleged that any specific birth was unlawful. "My office will investigate any suspected illegal birth tourism schemes in Texas, including the operations of two South Texas hospitals that appeared to advertise birth tourism on a billboard near the border," Paxton said. The hospitals join a wider effort the office opened in April, when Paxton sued De'Ai Postpartum Care Center near Houston, alleging it coached Chinese nationals on deceiving federal immigration officials to secure birthright citizenship. That case remains open. The investigation also extends a pattern in Paxton's border work, coming three weeks after he backed a congressional resolution asserting state authority over immigration enforcement, an area the Constitution largely reserves to the federal government.