A little after sunrise on Tuesday, July 14, 2026, four men bolted from a car parked at a Wawa gas station in St. Augustine, Florida. Federal agents had just walked up on them. One of the four, a 28-year-old man, sprinted across State Road 16 to get away. He ran straight into the path of a tractor-trailer.
He died right there on the pavement. The truck driver slammed on the brakes and jumped out to help, but there was nothing anyone could do. It was around 6:42 a.m. And it was, according to nearly every outlet covering it, the third death tied to immigration enforcement in a single week.
What actually happened at the gas station
Agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, which runs under ICE) rolled up on a vehicle sitting in the parking lot of a Wawa on State Road 16. According to Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Dylan Bryan, all four people inside the car got out and ran on foot the moment the encounter started.
Three of them scattered. The fourth crossed a busy road at the exact wrong second. The semi hit him in the right lane. A veterinary nurse who was on her way to work stopped and tried to save him, along with other bystanders. The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office handled traffic control while the eastbound lanes of SR 16 stayed shut down between Outlet Mall Boulevard and Inman Road.
A photo the sheriff’s office put out shows the truck blocking the highway. It belonged to Eggland’s Best, the egg company. Just a regular delivery driver who woke up that morning and had no idea he’d be part of a national story by lunchtime.
Nobody has said who he was
Here’s the part that sticks with you. Days after his death, the man still didn’t have a public name. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed only that agents ran an operation near St. Johns, Florida, and that Florida Highway Patrol and HSI were investigating “an incident resulting in the death of a Mexican national.”
That’s it. No name. And DHS didn’t answer questions about the three other people who ran. Were any of them the actual target of the operation? Unclear. Was the dead man even someone agents were looking for? Also unclear. He ran, a truck hit him, and the government’s statement fit in two sentences.
Three deaths in one week
The St. Augustine crash didn’t happen in a vacuum. It landed at the end of a brutal stretch for the agency.
On July 7, in Houston, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three who had lived in the U.S. for decades. Officials said he tried to run over an agent with his van. It later came out that Salgado Araujo wasn’t the person the operation was targeting in the first place.
Then, on July 13, in Biddeford, Maine, agents shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man named Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. He also wasn’t the target of the warrant. The officers involved weren’t wearing body cameras. Protesters flooded Maine towns, including the offices of Sen. Susan Collins.
The Florida Immigrant Coalition’s Adriana Rivera put the pattern in plain terms: “When federal agents descend on communities and initiate encounters that spark panic and fear, people run.” She added a line that’s hard to shake. “In the United States, in 2026, whether someone runs or complies with ICE, death is a very real possible outcome.”
ICE paused traffic stops. It lasted about a day.
The same afternoon the man died in Florida, ICE moved fast. At 3:43 p.m. on July 14, the agency sent out a memo telling agents to pause most vehicle stops “immediately.” Two sources confirmed the order to reporters.
The push came from a Republican. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, up for reelection, said the Biddeford shooting raised “sufficient critical questions.” She called DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin directly and urged him to stop all “non-violent traffic stops.” For a moment, it looked like the agency had actually listened.
A former ICE agent explained why the stops are such a mess in the first place. “When ICE does a traffic stop, they have limited authorities, because they’re supposed to be immigration related.” Traffic enforcement isn’t really their lane. Pulling cars over on public roads puts agents into split-second situations they aren’t built for.
Then Trump saw it, and killed it
The pause didn’t survive 24 hours. On Wednesday morning, July 15, President Trump posted on Truth Social praising ICE agents for doing a “GREAT job” and pushing back hard against the idea of easing up. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
Soon after, a White House official confirmed Trump had overturned the pause. Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox News and tried to reframe it. “It’s not a policy change, it’s a temporary pause,” he said, and insisted ICE is well-trained for vehicle stops.
Collins wasn’t satisfied. “In certain emergency situations, I understand traffic stops are warranted,” she said, “but to have them routinely done when we have had two recent shootings that are under investigation calls for a halt in that approach for now.” The Maine delegation, including Sen. Angus King, kept pressing Mullin for answers.
Even Republicans split on this one
What’s interesting is that the criticism didn’t fall along the usual party lines. Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, a Republican, flat out said traffic stops aren’t ICE’s job. “It’s not helpful, and it’s also politically damaging,” he said about the three back-to-back deaths.
On the other side, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, who’s running for governor in Florida, defended the enforcement. “We don’t want to see anybody pass away, but you fled federal law enforcement. You’re not supposed to do that.”
Democrats went further. Rep. Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island stood on the House floor and asked, “How many more people have to be killed in broad daylight?” He pointed out that Mullin, at his confirmation, said he wanted “to get the department off the front page of the news.” Instead, three deaths in a week put it right back there.
The body camera fight
One thread runs through all three cases: nobody can show you what really happened. The Maine agents had no body cameras. There’s no evidence the St. Augustine agents had them either.
That matters because Congress approved an extra $70 billion for the department last month, with Collins casting a deciding vote. That money was supposed to cover more training and body cameras, among other things. Rep. Andrew Garbarino, the Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, requested a bipartisan briefing to grill DHS on its use-of-force rules and camera rollout. As of the reporting, the agency hadn’t responded to his request. Senators King and Collins also warned that ICE can’t be trusted to investigate itself.
This has happened before
The St. Augustine crash was at least the 10th death tied to immigration encounters since the mass deportation campaign began, and it wasn’t even the first time someone died running across a road. Back in October, a pickup truck killed 24-year-old Josué Castro Rivera, a gardener from Honduras, on a highway in Norfolk, Virginia, as he tried to get away during a traffic stop. Authorities said he had “resisted heavily and fled.”
The Mexican government, meanwhile, asked state attorneys general across the U.S. to review the deaths of migrants in ICE custody and during raids for possible criminal prosecution.
Where things stand
Florida Highway Patrol and HSI are still investigating the crash. Interestingly, there were no protests in St. Augustine afterward, though the Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance (St. Augustine sits about 30 miles south of Jacksonville) had held a demonstration the Saturday before, demanding an end to escalated raids in the area. After the death, the group condemned the incident and tied it to a nationwide surge in ICE activity.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, a Democrat from Jacksonville, called it a tragedy caused by an out-of-control agency. “Whether it’s ICE agents gunning down a father in the streets of Houston, shooting a young man in Maine or conducting operations right here in Northeast Florida that result in a deadly crash,” she said, “the outcome is the same: fear, chaos and death.”
The traffic stop that started it all is back on. The pause is gone. And a 28-year-old man who ran across a road one summer morning is still, days later, just “a Mexican national” in a government statement.
