DHS agent killed US citizen in March last year, records reveal

Texas shooting appears to be the first known instance of a US citizen being killed during Trump’s immigration crackdown.

A federal immigration agent shot dead a citizen of the United States in March 2025, months before the Trump administration began its ⁠deportation surge in Minnesota that led to the shooting deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

According to records released this week, Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, was killed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents, lawyers for his ⁠family said in a statement.

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A DHS agent fired multiple rounds at Martinez, who allegedly hit another DHS agent with his car as the agents assisted local police in South Padre Island, Texas, with traffic control following an accident on March 15, 2025, according to the records obtained by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.

The records are part of a tranche of heavily redacted internal documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that the nonprofit obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The agents were conducting immigration enforcement, records show.

Martinez, who worked at an Amazon warehouse, had never had any prior run-ins with law enforcement, his mother, Rachel Reyes, said. “He was a typical young guy,” she told The Associated Press news agency. “And he wasn’t a violent person at all.”

Martinez, who was identified as a US citizen in the redacted records, was ⁠taken to hospital in nearby Brownsville, Texas, where he was later pronounced dead. The agent who was hit by a car went to the hospital for ⁠a knee injury and was later released, according to the report.

“These records ⁠paint a deeply troubling picture of the violent methods used by ICE,” Chioma Chukwu, the executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement.

“In just the first months of this administration, ICE’s own data shows a dramatic spike of nearly 400 per cent in use-of-force incidents – with people hospitalised, bystanders swept up ‌in operations, and even the death of a US citizen.”

A DHS spokesperson said in a statement that Martinez “intentionally ran over” an agent with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations, and another agent “fired defensive shots”. The nearly year-old incident is under ‌investigation ‌by the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Ranger Division, a DHS spokesperson said.

Call for investigation

Martinez’s ‌shooting appears to be the first known instance of a US citizen being killed during US President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown. Federal agents in the operation shot at least five people in January alone, including Pretti and Nicole Good in Minnesota.

Martinez was trying to comply with instructions from local law enforcement when he was shot, Charles Stam and Alex Stamm, lawyers for his family, said in a statement. They called for a “full and fair investigation”.

“Ruben’s family has been pursuing transparency and accountability for nearly a year now and will continue to ⁠do so for as long as it takes,” the lawyers said.

The mounting death ⁠toll has increased scrutiny of Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown, driving a backlash among lawmakers and the public. The Trump administration is dramatically ramping up immigration enforcement, with $170bn budgeted for immigration agencies through September 2029, a historic sum.