Newly released records show he was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent in Texas last year during a late-night traffic encounter the Department of Homeland Security has not publicly disclosed.
The death of Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, was the first of at least six fatal shootings by federal authorities since a nationwide immigration crackdown began during Donald Trump’s second term. DHS said Friday that the shooting occurred after a driver intentionally hit an agent on South Padre Island last March.
According to documents obtained by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Washington, the shooting occurred on a Homeland Security Investigations team that was conducting an immigration enforcement operation alongside local police.
The records are part of a batch of heavily redacted internal documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement obtained by the nonprofit as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Although local media outlets reported Martinez’s death on March 15, 2025, federal and state officials have not disclosed that an HSI team was involved in the shooting. DHS said in a statement Friday that the slain driver “intentionally ran into a Homeland Security Investigations special agent,” resulting in another agent firing defensive shots “to protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public.”
The department did not respond to questions about why there was no media release or other public notification about the officer-involved shooting over the past 11 months.
Martinez’s mother, Rachel Reyes, said just days after her son passed his 23rd birthday, he and his best friend drove to the beach from San Antonio to celebrate for the weekend. South Padre Island, located on the Gulf Coast north of the US-Mexico border, is a popular spring break destination that attracts tens of thousands of college-aged people every March.
Just after midnight, HSI officers were assisting South Padre Island police by rerouting traffic at a busy intersection after a vehicle crash with multiple injuries, according to an internal two-page ICE incident report included in the newly disclosed documents.
A blue, four-door Ford with a driver and passenger approached officers, who ordered the driver to stop. The report does not say why. Initially, the driver did not respond to commands but eventually stopped, according to the report.
Agents surrounded the vehicle, told the occupants to get out, but the driver “accelerated” and struck an HSI special agent who was “injured on the hood of the vehicle,” the report said. The HSI Supervisory Special Agent stood next to the car and then fired his weapon several times through the open driver’s side window and the vehicle stopped.
Paramedics already at the scene of the accident quickly rendered medical aid and the driver was taken by ambulance to Regional Hospital in Brownsville, where he was pronounced dead, according to the report. The passenger, who is an American citizen, was detained.
The HSI officer who was reportedly hit by the vehicle was treated for a knee injury at a nearby hospital and released.
The names of the two HSI agents involved in the shooting and the names of the two men in the car have all been redacted from the ICE report, but Reyes confirmed the driver was his son. She said that he was shot three times.
Reyes said she first learned a federal agent, not a local police officer, had shot her son a week after he was killed. She was contacted by an investigator from the Texas Rangers, the lead agency looking into the shooting. Reyes said the investigator told him there were videos of the shooting that contradicted the account provided by federal agents. DHS did not immediately respond to an email Friday about the claim that there is a video showing a different account.
She said an investigator told her a state report on the shooting was completed in October and the case will be presented to a grand jury for possible indictments.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which includes the Rangers, said in a statement Friday that the investigation into the shooting was still “active” and declined to provide further information.
