HSI Supervisory Agent Fatally Shoots US Citizen Ruben Ray Martinez at South Padre Island Traffic Scene; ICE Involvement Concealed for 11 Months

Opening

Shortly after midnight on March 15, 2025, Homeland Security Investigations Supervisory Special Agent Jack Stevens fired three shots through the driver’s-side window of a blue Ford sedan on South Padre Island, Texas. All three struck the driver, Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old US citizen from San Antonio. He died at a Brownsville hospital. The entire encounter lasted roughly fifteen seconds.

Federal immigration agents’ involvement in the killing was not publicly disclosed for more than eleven months — and when it was, the disclosure came from documents released to a nonprofit watchdog under public-records law, not from any government announcement.

What Happened / Key Facts

The scene was not an immigration operation. South Padre Island police were directing traffic around a two-car collision at a busy intersection. Three HSI agents from a maritime border-security task force — redirected to immigration enforcement duty — were present and assisting with traffic control. Martinez, driving home, encountered the roadblock.

What the body-camera footage shows. Video released in March 2026 shows Martinez’s car approaching the intersection slowly, appearing to continue straight where vehicles were being directed to turn left. The car slows to a crawl — nearly a full stop — for pedestrians in the crosswalk. Martinez is seen driving slowly past officers, at times interacting with them, brake lights illuminated. Then gunshots.

The claim the footage does not support. DHS asserted that Martinez intentionally rammed an agent with his vehicle immediately before he was shot. The body-camera videos, recorded from behind Martinez’s car, do not clearly show the vehicle striking anyone. Reporting across CBS News, Scripps News, Texas Public Radio, and Straight Arrow News converged on the same conclusion: the footage does not corroborate the government’s account.

The eleven-month concealment. Local Texas outlets reported the shooting when it happened in March 2025 — as a shooting. The involvement of federal immigration agents was first revealed in February 2026 by Newsweek, which connected the death to an internal ICE report obtained by American Oversight, a nonprofit ethics watchdog, through public-records litigation. The internal ICE report redacts Martinez’s name. His family learned that a federal agent killed their son from news reports.

The mother’s account. Rachel Reyes, Martinez’s mother, told CBS News: “Since Ruben’s death a year ago, all we have wanted is justice for him.” She described a son who “wasn’t a violent person at all” and for whom the trip to South Padre Island “was his first time getting to go out of town.”

Legislative response. Texas state Rep. Ray Lopez (D), vice chair of the Texas House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety, formally exercised authority under Rule 4, Section 6A of the Texas House Rules to compel Republican Committee Chairman Cole Hefner to schedule a hearing on the death, demanding a response by February 23, 2026. On March 24, 2026, House Oversight Democrats demanded a federal investigation. ICE said an investigation was underway and “We have no further information to provide.”

Why It Matters

This is the earliest confirmed killing of a US citizen by a federal immigration agent in the current enforcement expansion, and it establishes that the pattern visible in Minneapolis in January 2026 did not begin there. Renee Good was killed on 2026-01-07 and Alex Pretti on 2026-01-24 — nearly ten months after Martinez. Treating Minneapolis as the origin frames federal lethal force as an aberration; Martinez establishes it as a continuation.

The case is also the cleanest available demonstration of the disclosure layer of the evidence-control pattern documented across these killings. Each has its own mechanism for controlling the record afterward:

• Martinez (South Padre Island, 2025-03-15) — federal involvement concealed for 11+ months; surfaced only via american-oversight public-records work
• 2025-10-04–border-patrol-shoots-marimar-martinez-chicago — the shooter’s vehicle released from FBI custody, driven ~1,100 miles to Maine, and buffed with brake cleaner before a judge ordered it returned by flatbed
• 2026-01-08–fbi-blocks-state-investigation-renee-good-shooting — FBI revoked Minnesota BCA access to evidence, blocking the state investigation
• Camp East Montana, El Paso (2026-01) — after the county medical examiner ruled geraldo-lunas-campos’s death a homicide, the next body went to William Beaumont Army Medical Center, which does not release autopsy reports publicly

Four killings, four different layers of the record controlled: disclosure, physical evidence, investigative jurisdiction, forensic determination. The mechanism is not one cover-up repeated but a repertoire.

Martinez also sits against 2010-05-28–anastasio-hernandez-rojas-beaten-tasered-death-border-patrol, where the same architecture operated fifteen years earlier and drew an IACHR finding of US responsibility in 2025. The pattern predates this administration.

Finally, the scene matters. HSI agents assigned to maritime border security had been redirected to immigration enforcement and were standing at a traffic accident. A US citizen driving through a police-directed intersection was shot three times in fifteen seconds. Whatever else this was, it was not an immigration enforcement encounter.

Open Questions

• Status of the ICE internal investigation and whether Stevens faced discipline or charges
• Whether the Texas House Homeland Security Committee hearing was ever scheduled
• Whether DOJ opened any civil-rights review
• The full American Oversight document set and what else it contains