A 24-year-old Honduran man died while trying to flee Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Virginia, bringing the death toll among those trying to escape detention in the Trump administration’s mass deportation crackdown to at least three people.
Jose Castro Rivera was killed on Thursday morning after running onto a busy highway and being struck and fatally injured while trying to evade ICE agents, local authorities said.
A Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that ICE agents stopped a vehicle as part of a “targeted, intelligence-based immigration enforcement operation” but did not provide further details about Castro Rivera, or any of the other passengers who were detained but survived the operation. An ICE agent administered CPR to Castro Rivera, but he died at the scene, according to the official.
The fatal incident took place on the busy Interstate 264 eastbound at the Military Highway interchange in Norfolk in south-east Virginia. The Virginia state police said they were not involved in the pursuit and the fatal crash remains under investigation.
This is the third known deadly incident involving immigrants trying to flee immigration raids by masked, armed federal agents that are spreading across the country, as part of the Trump administration’s relentless crackdown on immigrants and unprecedented expansion of ICE.
In August, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdés, 52, of Guatemala was killed on the freeway after fleeing an ICE raid at a Home Depot in Monrovia, California, about 20 miles (32km) north-east of downtown Los Angeles. The home improvement retailer, which has long been a meeting spot for employers to recruit documented and undocumented day laborers as roofers, painters and construction workers, has been targeted by the Trump administration for ICE operations.
The Guatemalan man’s death came just a month after another deadly ICE raid in southern California.
Mexican farm worker Jaime Alanís García, 56, died after falling 30ft (9 meters) from a greenhouse while fleeing federal agents at the state-licensed Glass House Farms cannabis facility in Camarillo, Ventura county. Alanís García, who had been living and working in the US for about three decades to support his family in Michoacán, Mexico, climbed onto the roof in a desperate effort to get away from the masked ICE agents and national guard soldiers during the July raid, in which more than 300 people were detained. He suffered catastrophic injuries and was taken off life support after two days.
Trump and his anti-immigrant advisers have repeatedly claimed that the unprecedented resources and power being gifted to ICE is about removing “illegal criminals” off American streets.
Yet official government data shows that immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by ICE and detained by the Trump administration has surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.
At least 20 people have died in ICE custody so far this year, according to a recent NPR investigation, making it the deadliest year since 2004.
