A Texas grand jury has declined to indict an ICE agent in the fatal shooting of a San Antonio man last year.
The Cameron County District Attorney’s Office presented the case involving 23-year-old Ruben Martinez, who was shot in March 2025 in South Padre Island while visiting during spring break. The grand jury issued a No Bill.
The Department of Homeland Security had not publicly disclosed that an ICE agent was involved in the shooting until it was reported on by media outlets last week.
The DA’s office provided no further details.
Documents obtained by American Oversight, a Washington-based nonprofit watchdog group, show the shooting occurred during a Homeland Security Investigations immigration enforcement operation while agents assisted local police with traffic around a car accident.
An ICE incident report described officers ordering the driver of a four-door Ford with a passenger to stop. The vehicle initially did not respond, then stopped as agents surrounded it and ordered occupants out. The driver accelerated forward, striking an HSI special agent who landed on the hood, prompting a supervisory special agent to fire multiple shots through the open driver’s side window.
Attorneys for Martinez’s family cited a draft affidavit from passenger Joshua Orta disputing the report. Orta said Martinez did not hit an officer, that their car was “just crawling,” and that a federal agent fired into the driver’s side window without “giving any warning, commands, or opportunity to comply,” Fox 4 KDFW reported. Orta later died in a car crash.
The attorneys called for the Texas Department of Public Safety to disclose its investigation findings so they can “determine for themselves whether ICE’s story is accurate and why Ruben was killed that night,” the Associated Press reported.
Initial local reports labeled the incident an officer-involved shooting without naming an agency. The Department of Homeland Security offered no response to the 11-month silence about Martinez’s death. State departments described the case as active, and the Texas DPS provided no new information.