The credentialed media rarely tell us outright lies, but sometimes you have to look pretty closely to find the parts they don’t want for you to know. From this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Getting ‘legal status’ in America is harder than most people think. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by ICE before he could.

A resident of the U.S. for 35 years, the construction worker was fatally shot by ICE agents while still trying to navigate the nation’s arcane immigration system.

by Luis F. Carrasco | Columnist | Monday, July 13, 2026 | 6:01 AM EDT

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Tuesday in Houston. He arrived in the U.S. from Mexico 35 years ago, built a construction business, and became one of five people killed by federal agents carrying out President Donald Trump’s plan of mass deportation.

As I read and listened to commentary from sources outraged by the killing, I kept bumping into their description of Salgado Araujo. Not that he was a hardworking father and loving husband who had sent his three U.S. citizen children to college, but that he was “on his way to obtaining legal status,” or was “applying for proper authorization.”

I know enough about immigration law to ask: What did that even mean? How could a man who had been in the U.S. for more than three decades as an undocumented immigrant be working to adjust his legal status?

During a news conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado spoke eloquently about his father, heartbroken that the man who “wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people” did not deserve to be reduced to a headline. But Salgado also said this:

At this point, at least in the online version, we encounter a photograph, a break in which people might stop reading. Then more:

“After nearly 35 years of working to give us the American dream, he made the choice to begin the process of obtaining his American dream through a work permit. We dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ filled every document, attended every appointment. He was close to obtaining his legal status.”

The columnist then goes through some of the hardships in becoming a legal immigrant after having illegally crossed the border. Yeah, it should be more difficult to obtain legal status after starting out by breaking the law! But we also have the younger Mr Salgado telling us that his father “was close to obtaining his legal status.”

The elder Mr Salgado was here for thirty-five years! If I remember my first-grade arithmetic well enough, that works out to 1991, though 1990 or 1992 might be accurate as well, given the ambiguity. That was after President Ronald Reagan’s ‘amnesty’ for illegal immigrants, the one which was supposed to provide relief for illegals already here, but close the doors to those still trying to sneak across the border.

It didn’t stop the elder Mr Salgado from getting into our country illegally, did it?

1989 through 1992 were the years under the elder President George Bush, who was pretty busy with other things, and didn’t worry too much about fighting for President Reagan’s determination that new illegals shouldn’t be allowed in. President Bill Clinton followed, and while some were deported under him, rounding up the illegals and kicking them out wasn’t a priority for him, nor his successors, the younger George Bush and Barack Hussein Obama.

Along comes President Donald Trump, and he attempted to close our southern border to the flood of illegals, with some success, but he was not nearly as aggressive in trying to round up the illegals and kick them out. I suspect that, had he not lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, his first-term policies would have been continued during a 2021-2025 term. Instead, President Biden just opened the floodgates, and millions poured through.

Finally, Mr Trump gets a second term, and finally Mr Salgado realizes that the jig is up, and he’d better try to get legal. One thing is clear: Mr Salgado wasn’t motivated to try to legalize his status until it became likely that President Trump would give him a chance to Make Mexico Great Again! He wasn’t really concerned about legality until it seemed like he would get caught!

In his penultimate paragraph’ the columnist wrote:

People like Salgado Araujo — who have built their lives here and just want to go about their business and contribute to their communities — are exactly the kind of immigrants most Americans want to allow to stay.

Mr Salgado didn’t seem to want to “go about (his) business” enough to include obtaining legal status during the thirty-three years he was here and not trying to apply for legal status. He was apparently willing to poke along illegally for over three decades until 77,302,580 of us voted no, voted to send him south of the border.

Columnist Carrasco didn’t bother to tell Inquirer readers that Mr Salgado, having been stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, agents, then tried to escape, struck an unmarked ICE vehicle, and then tried to use the vehicle he was driving to run down an ICE agent, as reported by The New York Times. Yes, of course, the men in the vehicle with him, at least some of whom were themselves illegals, claim that none of that happened, but they have every reason to lie through their teeth. At the very least, had Mr Salgado, the driver, simply complied with law enforcement after having been stopped, there would have been no reason to shoot him. Telling his readers that might have made them less sympathetic to Mr Carrasco’s position.

I get it: the editorial position of our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper is to protect illegal immigrants at all costs. But however peaceable and law-abiding, at least when it came to non-immigration-related laws, Mr Saldago was, when the rubber hit the road, Mr Salgado was willing to break the law and try to escape. Under 18 USC §111, that’s a felony, with an enhancement of up to twenty years in prison if using a deadly weapon, such as trying to run over a federal officer with a vehicle, is involved.

President Trump, during the Joe Biden interruption, opposed a congressional effort to change our immigration laws, but that does not change the fact than our immigration laws have remained in force under Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush again, and Obama. There were Democrat majorities in one or both Houses of Congress during parts of those Administrations, and nothing was ever passed to change the immigration laws that Mr Carrasco doesn’t seem to like. Our laws are our laws, and today’s American left, who were adamant that no one is above the law when they were trying to throw Mr Trump in jail, somehow thing that illegal immigrants like Mr Salgado should be above the law.