A federal agent shot and killed a man from Mexico during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday morning, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement.
The director said that the man had tried to run down the officer who opened fire, though no evidence was immediately provided to support that account.
ICE agents stopped a vehicle around 6:50 a.m. and tried to arrest the driver, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, according to David Venturella, the agency’s acting director. Mr. Venturella described Mr. Araujo as an “illegal alien” but did not say why he was being sought.
His statement said that the driver had “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over the agent, who fired at him. Rustin Rawlings, a spokesman for the Houston Fire Department, said that Mr. Araujo was shot in his abdomen. Mr. Araujo was taken to a hospital and died.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office is leading an investigation into the agent-involved shooting. The F.B.I.’s Houston office will focus its investigation into an alleged assault on a federal law enforcement officer.
Several federal law enforcement accounts of shootings by immigration agents this year have since been contradicted by video evidence. They include two fatal shootings in Minneapolis during a crackdown in January, and another in which video undermined the account of an ICE agent, resulting in dropped charges against the man who was shot.
Reached by phone on Tuesday night, Mr. Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, said his father was “a hard-working man who was trying to obtain his work permit the right way to provide for his family.” He wrote in a Facebook post that his father had been working in construction to provide for himself, his two brothers and his mother.
“My father did not deserve this,” he wrote.
Mr. Salgado said the family planned to say more on Wednesday morning at a news conference.
Mr. Araujo had been in the country for 35 years and was a father of three, according to Juan Proaño, chief executive of the League of United Latin American Citizens, an organization that has been in touch with the Araujo family. Mr. Araujo was on his way to a construction site with three workers, including a brother, when he encountered the federal agents, Mr. Proaño said.
The federal government did not respond to a request for comment on the additional passengers.
The shooting in Houston is part of a growing number of altercations between people in cars and federal agents involved in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
About 20 people have been shot in their cars, some of them fatally. In most cases, federal officials have said that the actions were justified because the vehicles had been “weaponized” and the agents’ lives were in danger.
Mr. Proaño said his organization is calling for an independent investigation into the shooting by the local authorities.
He called the government’s account “a template.”
“We don’t trust ICE, and we don’t trust the F.B.I. to be responsible enough or open or transparent enough with what happened today,” he said.
A vigil to remember Mr. Salgado is planned for Wednesday night.
On Tuesday night, a small group of about 30 people gathered near the scene to protest the shooting. Some of them chanted, “No fear, no hate, no ICE in our state.”
Janie Torres, 59, a local resident who joined the impromptu gathering, said the incident had spread fear in the immigrant enclave.
“It can be anybody. It could be anyone of us,” Ms. Torres said. “It’s the truth.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Maria Jimenez Moya contributed reporting from Houston.