Honduran immigrant dies while fleeing ICE, bringing raids death toll to three | Virginia
A 24-year-old Honduran man died while trying to evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Virginia, bringing the death toll to at least three people among those trying to escape custody in the Trump administration’s mass deportation crackdown.
Jose Castro Rivera was shot and fatally wounded as he tried to evade ICE agents after running on a busy highway Thursday morning, local authorities said.
A Department of Homeland Security official said: NBC News He said ICE agents stopped a vehicle as part of a “targeted, intelligence-driven immigration enforcement operation” but did not provide further details about Castro Rivera or the other passengers who were detained but survived the operation. An ICE agent performed CPR on Castro Rivera, but Castro died at the scene, according to the official.
The fatal incident occurred on busy eastbound Interstate 264 at the Military Highway interchange in Norfolk, southeastern Virginia. Virginia state police said they were not involved in the pursuit and that the fatal crash is under investigation.
This is the third known deadly incident involving immigrants trying to escape immigration raids by masked, armed federal agents sweeping across the country, part of the Trump administration’s brutal crackdown on immigrants and unprecedented expansion of ICE.
In August, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdés, a 52-year-old man from Guatemala, was killed on a highway after fleeing an ICE raid on a Home Depot in Monrovia, California, about 20 miles (32 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles. The home improvement retailer, long a meeting point for employers to hire documented and undocumented day laborers as roofers, painters and construction workers, was targeted by the Trump administration for its ICE operations.
The Guatemalan man’s death comes just a month after another deadly ICE raid in Southern California.
Mexican farm worker Jaime Alanís García, 56, died after falling 30 feet from a greenhouse while escaping from federal agents at the state-licensed Glass House Farms marijuana facility in Camarillo, Ventura County. Alanis García, who has lived and worked in the United States for nearly three decades to support his family in Michoacán, Mexico, climbed to the roof in a desperate attempt to escape masked ICE agents and national guard soldiers during a July raid that detained more than 300 people. He suffered catastrophic injuries and was taken off life support two days later.
Trump and his anti-immigrant advisers have repeatedly claimed that the unprecedented resources and power given to ICE is about taking “illegal criminals” off American streets.
But official government data shows that immigrants without criminal records are now the largest group in immigration detention in the United States. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by ICE and detained by the Trump administration exceeded the number charged with crimes.
At least 20 people have died in ICE custody so far this year, according to one report. latest NPR surveyIt was the deadliest year since 2004.
