The ACLU of Florida is fiercely condemning Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tuesday after a 28-year-old man was killed by a truck while fleeing federal agents in St. Augustine — marking the third tragic death following an ICE encounter in just one week.
The victim was among four occupants of a vehicle that stopped in the parking lot of a gas station and convenience store in the St. Augustine area before 7 a.m. During an encounter with agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations, the four fled on foot, with one darting across a busy road into the path of the semi, Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Dylan Bryan said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.
The driver of the semi stopped and tried to help the man, Bryan said.
It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the encounter Tuesday. In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed it had conducted an operation and said the Florida Highway Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations were “investigating an incident resulting in the death of a Mexican national.”
The man's death Tuesday follows two other recent fatal incidents involving ICE: the July 7 shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, and Monday's fatal shooting of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. In both of those cases, ICE later reported that the men were not the intended targets of federal agents.
“Our country is experiencing an existential crisis, and it is one we cannot afford to look away from,” said Keisha Mulfort, Deputy Executive Director and Strategy Officer of the ACLU of Florida. “When people are dying because they are afraid — afraid of a traffic stop, afraid of a gas station, afraid of driving to work — we are no longer talking about immigration enforcement.”
READ MORE: Immigration operation standoff at a Lake Worth Beach bakery inflames community tensions
The ACLU of Florida blames the deaths squarely on aggressive federal immigration enforcement policies, saying that ICE agents are flooding onto local streets nationwide to meet "arbitrary and unprecedented arrest quotas the Trump administration invented out of thin air."
The latest deaths involving ICE come amid a Trump administration push to carry out its mass deportations agenda. During the five-day period at the end of June, ICE arrested more than 10,000 people.
The ACLU of Florida said the quotas have turned federal immigration enforcement into a "rogue agency operating without oversight, without restraint, and without regard for human life."
While the specific details of the St. Augustine incident remain under investigation, the ACLU of Florida maintains that the systemic problem is already undeniable.
“While we may not yet know every fact of what happened this morning, we know enough,” Mulfort said. “An agency is answering to arrest quotas instead of the Constitution, and it will continue costing people their lives until someone with the power to stop this does.”
The ACLU of Florida is demanding that Congress break its silence and intervene immediately to end the quota system.
“Congress must end these arrest quotas now. Secretary Mullin must draw down ICE’s nationwide arrest surge and commit to real reform. There should not be a next name on this list,” Mulfort said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
