The government’s account of what led to the fatal ICE shooting of father and longtime Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is false, according to witnesses who were with Salgado Araujo in his van when the shooting occurred, an attorney who spoke to the men said. “After speaking with these three men that were in the vehicle with Lorenzo, I have no doubt that what these ICE agents are saying is completely false,” the lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, said in a video posted to Instagram. “At no point did they ever use the van to ram into the ICE agents, and at no point were these ICE agents’ lives ever in any danger.” After the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot Salgado Araujo in “self-defense” after he “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle” and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” ICE and DHS, its parent agency, have a history of lying about people agents shoot. Balderas-Ibarra added: “The ICE agents’ accounts of what happened do not reflect — and are very inconsistent with — the stories, with the recollections, that I got from the three people that were in the vehicle with Lorenzo.” Balderas-Ibarra relayed that after an ICE agent shot Salgado Araujo, the father of three said “ya me mataron” — or, roughly, “now they’ve killed me.” Attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra speaks to reporters after a press briefing in Houston on Friday. Balderas-Ibarra is representing two of the other passengers who were in the car when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.Annie Mulligan/Associated PressBalderas-Ibarra also shared a handwritten statement from one of the men with The Washington Post. While in ICE custody, Jose Trinidad Rojas, who was in the vehicle when the shooting occurred, wrote that the DHS statement “is a lie.”“It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over,” the statement continued, as quoted by the Post, as “there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”Balderas-Ibarra told the Post that the two other witnesses in the vehicle — whom he said he spoke with separately and are being held separately — gave the same story. The other witnesses are Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Salgado Araujo’s brother, Victor Salgado. “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” the attorney told the Post. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”According to the witnesses’ accounts, which Balderas-Ibarra described to the paper, an unmarked vehicle started following Salgado Araujo’s vehicle Tuesday morning, then cut it off in traffic. Salgado Araujo made a U-turn, and the vehicle turned on its police lights. Given construction on the roadway, Salgado Araujo was driving slowly, but at that point ICE vehicles rammed the work vehicle, according to the witnesses.“Lorenzo thought we had lost them but suddenly they surrounded us,” Rojas wrote in his handwritten account, the Post reported. In the Post’s words: “An officer then jumped out of one of the vehicles, ran toward them from the side and yelled, ‘Stop!’ He started firing from the passenger side of the van, hitting Salgado Araujo in the abdomen. Victor Salgado, the driver’s brother, said he felt the force of the firearm as the agent pointed his gun toward his brother.” “When he shot my brother, the gun was in front of my face,” Salgado, who was sitting in the passenger seat, said, according to Balderas-Ibarra’s interview notes, which he read to the Post. Even after Salgado Araujo was able to put his vehicle into park, the shots continued, the Post reported of the witnesses’ accounts.“It just happened so fast,” Salgado told Balderas-Ibarra. He recalled an ICE agent saying, mockingly: “Se querían escapar, verdad?” Or: “You wanted to escape, right?” At a press conference Friday alongside elected officials, Balderas-Ibarra said the men “confirmed that at no point was there ever an ICE agent directly in front of the vehicle. They also confirmed that the shots came from the sides, not from the front, which is inconsistent with the ICE agents’ statement.” Later, he hedged slightly on the latter point, saying, “apparently, one of the witnesses thought that [the shots] came from the side, but it’s not been verified, like I said, I just spoke to them briefly, and there’s still a lot of investigating to do.”“All three of my clients reiterated that at no point was there ever an agent standing in front of the vehicle, nor was an agent ever placed in the line of danger,” Balderas-Ibarra said separately at the press conference. “That is simply false, and I believe my clients are telling the truth.” Separately, while Balderas-Ibarra said he’d spoken to all three witnesses, he said he is representing only two of them, Rojas and Tirado. And he said at the press conference that they were currently being held at ICE’s Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas.Neither ICE nor DHS immediately responded to HuffPost’s questions Friday.