ST. JOHNS COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES
A photo provided by the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office shows the site of a fatal crash in St. Augustine, Fla., today. A 28-year-old man running from “an encounter” with federal immigration agents at a gas station in St. Augustine, Fla., was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer this morning, according to a state highway patrol spokesman.
A 28-year-old man running from “an encounter” with federal immigration agents at a gas station in St. Augustine, Florida, was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer this morning, according to a state highway patrol spokesperson.
It was not immediately clear whether the man interacted with the ICE agents or if they were pursuing him.
The death happened shortly before 7 a.m. near a Wawa gas station on a busy thoroughfare. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations were at the station at the time, according to Sgt. Dylan Bryan, the Florida Highway Patrol spokesperson.
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The man who died had been inside a vehicle at the gas station with three other people who also fled, Bryan said. The accident briefly snarled morning traffic along the road, about 35 miles south of Jacksonville.
In a statement this evening, the Department of Homeland Security shed little light on what happened, saying only that agents had conducted an operation near St. Johns County, Florida, and that an incident had resulted in the death of a Mexican national.
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The state highway patrol is investigating the traffic death. The man’s identity has not been released.
The whereabouts of the three others who had been in his vehicle were unclear this afternoon. The vehicle was towed as part of the investigation, Bryan said.
The incident unfolded amid increased scrutiny of federal agents who have recently intensified enforcement as part of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown. The Trump administration has ordered a halt to most ICE traffic stops after two killings in which agents shot into vehicles.
On Monday, agents shot and killed a man in Biddeford, Maine. Agents had tried pulling over his car, which had just left a home they were monitoring, according to a Homeland Security statement. A spokesperson for Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said that Homeland Security officials told the senator that the man was not the person they were looking for.
Last week, an ICE agent fatally shot a Mexican immigrant, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during a traffic stop in Houston. Homeland Security later said that Salgado Araujo was not the operation’s intended target.
The Florida Immigrant Coalition, an advocacy group, said in a statement that the man’s actions in St. Augustine underscored the dread that immigrant communities are feeling after the shootings in Texas and Maine.
“While details remain unclear, one fact is undeniable: People are dying in the chaos and fear created by ICE operations,” the statement said.
There are other cases in which immigrants were injured or killed while running from immigration agents over the past year.
A 25-year-old Honduran immigrant died last fall when he ran onto a highway in Norfolk, Virginia, after ICE agents stopped the vehicle he was in. Months earlier, a man running from a raid at a Home Depot was fatally struck by a vehicle on a freeway in Monrovia, California.
And last summer, a farmworker died while fleeing an ICE raid at a cannabis farm in Ventura County, California.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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