Tests of a substance found inside the van driven by a man shot to death by immigration officers last month in Houston revealed it wasn’t methamphetamine, U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed to The Texas Tribune.

“I can confirm what’s already public: lab testing showed the substance in the baggies was not meth,” Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said in a statement to the Tribune.

Reitz didn’t say what substance was actually in the plastic bags the FBI found in the van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old Mexican shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on July 7.

On July 14, a week after Salgado Araujo’s killing, the FBI suggested there could be meth inside the van when it sought a search warrant to test “crystal-like substances.”

The search warrant affidavit was made public the day after it was filed, a move that critics saw as unusually fast and aimed at staining the victim’s and witnesses’ names, but the test results still haven’t been released a month later.

Reitz’s office didn’t respond to questions about whether the test results will be made public, citing the ongoing investigation into the shooting. A spokesperson for the FBI’s Houston office said they “continue to decline commenting on an open investigation.”

U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office and a lawyer representing Salgado Araujo’s brother have insisted the substance in the bags was salt that the men mixed with water and lemon to stay hydrated while working construction during the hot Texas summers.

“They made the announcement (about the search warrant) with full intention to cause harm, period. They could have done the test before the announcement, but normally within one or two days you already know if it’s drugs or not,” said attorney Raed Gonzalez, who is representing two of the witnesses, José Trinidad Rojas Pliego and Daniel Tirado Pantoja, for their habeas corpus petitions challenging their detention.

“If they arrest a client of mine right now with something that looks like marijuana, it’s immediately sent for analysis and we have the result the next day because they have to book him,” Gonzalez added. “You have it that fast, within one or two days.”

Reitz said that “there was never a ‘suggestion’ of narcotics. We had probable cause, which is exactly why we test substances law enforcement believes may be illegal. That’s the process working as designed.”

Reitz added that there’s nothing unusual about federal officials quickly making information like the search warrant affidavit public “when the public deserves transparency.”

The FBI crime lab is one of the largest and most sophisticated in the country, if not the most, and a drug test is a “fairly straightforward” procedure, said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who became a professor of policing and public safety at the University of South Carolina.

“When it’s in the government’s interest to get an answer quickly, they can get an answer quickly,” he said. “But the opposite is also true: with the right couple of phone calls, somebody can slow-walk something.”

If a drug test is high priority, Stoughton said, a drug test can take a few days to a week. For lower priority tests, he added, “it may take significantly longer than that.”

“I think we see it in multiple administrations and sometimes with state and local police agencies, where there is a reluctance to release information that they think might make them look bad or that might contradict a narrative that they are trying to establish,” Stoughton said. “One of the hard-earned lessons in policing at every level is that it is much better to be upfront with information, even if that information seems bad for you, than it is to try and hide information.”

Early in the morning of July 7, Salgado Araujo picked up his brother Víctor and their fellow workers, Rojas Pliego and Tirado Pantoja, and headed to a construction job in his van. A little before 7 a.m., two unmarked ICE vehicles without emergency lights or sirens started following them through Magnolia Park, a heavily Latino Houston neighborhood.

ICE argued in a statement that Salgado Araujo rammed their vehicles trying to flee and the officers shot in self-defense. The other men in the van later said Salgado Araujo never tried to hit the officers after and instead ICE vehicles struck them from behind and the side.

“When we look at other things this administration has done towards victims and witnesses, it’s to attempt to tarnish their name and put doubt in the public’s mind about their intentions and their good moral character,” said Ruby Powers, the attorney for Víctor Salgado Araujo.

Only Rojas Pliego has been released. Víctor Salgado Araujo and Tirado Pantoja remain in ICE detention centers.

“We moved on,” Powers added. “They tried to do something. They were unsuccessful because my client and those in the van were of good moral character, they were good, hard-working individuals, just trying to go to work.”

Correction, Aug. 13, 2026, 3:11 p.m. Central: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story incorrectly identified Aaron Reitz's jurisdiction. He is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.