ICE Never Stopped Chasing People in Cars in the Rio Grande Valley

As thousands of people from all over the United States came to the Laguna Madre area this past weekend to watch SpaceX’s latest launch in South Texas, many who live in the nearest towns—Laguna Vista, Port Isabel, Laguna Heights, and South Padre Island—stayed indoors.  

Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents had been arresting several people in the area over the last few weeks, likely as part of a new federal directive from earlier this month to increase arrests to 2,000 a day across the country. The agency’s presence has led to residents making their own warning system to inform the community, many of whom are mixed-status, of where agents are at any given time.

Preceding many of these arrests was a car chase through the residential streets of Laguna Vista on July 14, happening the same day that the Trump administration issued a directive to ICE to temporarily halt most traffic stops, following the ICE killings of two people in Houston and Maine, according to reporting early that morning from the New York Times. The pause lasted about a day. 

But that afternoon, ICE agents in Laguna Vista—a town of around 4,000 in the Rio Grande Valley that’s a 20-minute drive from South Padre Island, where ICE agents killed a U.S. citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, in March last year—sped after a crew of roofers who were on their way back to a job site, according to witnesses. ICE confirmed that agents were in the area on July 14 when asked by the Observer. 

Traveling in two cars, a red Jeep and a dark-colored Ford Escape, the seven roofers were leaving a Stripes convenience store in Laguna Vista after their lunch break, heading back to their work site in town. A black SUV passed them on the two-lane Highway 510. The SUV made a U-turn, then accelerated towards them. The SUV, which was unmarked, did not have sirens on. 

The roofers, at some point, split, the red Jeep going down Fernandez Street and blowing past the four-way intersection at Taylor Street, the unmarked black SUV following close behind. Laguna Vista resident Samantha Weber Alarcón, who was driving with her son, was heading to a movie theater in Brownsville when she saw the Jeep and the black SUV run the stop sign on Fernandez Street in the early afternoon. 

Thinking it was the local police chasing a speeding teenager, she continued onto Fernandez and then onto Mesquite Drive, the end of which leads to Highway 100 toward Brownsville. She had just started driving down the street when a different car, the dark-colored Ford Escape, sped past her on the left, hitting a speedbump, then stopping in the driveway of a home halfway up the street. Close behind were the same black SUV and a white SUV, neither with sirens on, driving side by side trying to make “three lanes of traffic into a two-lane road,” Weber Alarcón told the Observer. 

“They speeded right next to me,” she said during a phone interview. “They hit the speed bump so bad that, when they got in front of me at high speed, I had to go to the right. … If not, they would have hit me.”

Now in a ditch on the side of the street, Weber Alarcón called 911. While she was on the phone with a dispatcher, she got out of her truck and started walking toward the SUVs. She could see that men had emerged from the SUVs with t-shirts, jeans, and green vests that said “ICE”—and that one of them was pointing a gun a few feet from the open back window of the Ford. Inside the Ford, a man in the backseat had his hands up, a paper bag with his lunch in one of them. 

“I guess I was in more fear because of what I had just seen happen to the young guy in Maine,” Weber Alarcón said, recounting her thoughts from that day. “I had just seen that in the morning before I left to the movies. So, can you imagine my train of thought when I saw him pull the gun on the kid?” 

The driver and front passenger of the Ford were gone. They had run off behind the house whose driveway they’d driven into, escaping from the agents who chased them on foot. Weber Alarcón began yelling at the agents that they had almost hit her and her son. She pulled out her phone and started taking photos of what she was seeing. She said that when she pulled her phone out, the agent put his gun down, took the man out of the backseat of the car, and put him in handcuffs. 

Weber Alarcón, believing the handcuffed man was a student she knew at Port Isabel High School, was yelling at the agents to let him go. By then, a Laguna Vista Police Department sergeant arrived and started making a report. Weber Alarcón said that the police officer repeatedly told her he could do nothing about what the agents were doing other than report it to the ICE agents’ supervisors. 

Realizing the man they pulled from the backseat was a U.S. citizen, the agents uncuffed him. Weber Alarcón started telling the agents again that their driving could have killed her and her son. She said one agent apologized and had “a million excuses” as to why they drove the way they did. Then one of the agents asked Weber Alarcón if she could take the man from the backseat home because the car he was riding in was now part of an investigation. The agents then sped away down the street, the Laguna Vista police officer yelling at them to slow down.

“I said [to the officer], ‘You see, they almost hit us, and they could care less,’” Weber Alarcón said.

Weber Alarcón then drove the man, who was not actually the student from Port Isabel High School, to his home in Brownsville. In a statement to the Observer, an ICE spokesperson said “officers were conducting targeted enforcement” in the area and “observed a vehicle driving erratically,” before the driver sped up to get away from the officers. “There was no vehicle pursuit or arrest attempt,” the spokesperson said.

The statement continued to say that, after the driver and passenger fled, agents encountered the “abandoned vehicle” with the young man in the backseat, claiming he ignored orders to exit the car and “began reaching into a tool bag”—where the spokesperson said “a knife was later discovered”—causing the officer to draw his gun. After the man exited with hands up, he was identified “as an 18-year-old U.S. citizen” and released.

The man, who spoke to the Observer on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals,  challenged ICE’s account. The alleged knife, he said, was a shingle cutter in his tool bag. He is also in his mid-twenties, not 18, as ICE stated.

“The car was not abandoned. They didn’t just show up to an abandoned vehicle. That’s a lie,” Weber Alarcón said when shown ICE’s statement. “They did a high-speed chase.”

Weber Alarcón’s post about the incident has been shared thousands of times on Facebook. Since then, several other posts on the social media site have documented ICE agents in the Laguna Madre area surrounding vehicles or arresting people. 

ICE has limited authority to stop and question individuals they think are in the country illegally. Before agents stop someone, they must have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the U.S. without authorization. The bar is higher for warrantless arrests: Agents must have reason to believe the person may escape before they can get a warrant.

Agents can’t use race, ethnicity, accent, and the type of work someone does alone as motives to detain them, but they can be factors in deciding whether to do so. A Los Angeles federal court temporarily blocked the consideration of those factors last July, but the Supreme Court stayed that decision in an ongoing case.

From the Laguna Madre area, photos and videos collected on social media and sent to the Observer show ICE agents almost exclusively around trucks with construction or lawn care equipment in their beds. 

There is little legal recourse for people who are lawful permanent residents or U.S. citizens and are detained or arrested by ICE, even if their rights were likely violated.

“Just the experience of having a gun pointed at you, having agents aggressively approach your car, endangering people on the road, coming into your yard or home, obviously, that is an extremely traumatic event for anyone who has to experience it,” Michelle Lapointe, legal director for the American Immigration Council, told the Observer. “So even if those folks don’t end up being put in proceedings because they can’t be deported, and the government knows that, it’s still an extremely humiliating and traumatic experience.” 

Laguna Vista City Manager Victor Trevino told the Observer he had heard of the ICE chase but didn’t know any details. No Laguna Vista elected official responded to a request for comment, nor did the police chief, Daniel Holland. 

Unlike in larger cities across the country, where ICE made large shows of their descents into neighborhoods, the agency’s movement in the Valley is usually documented by community members on social media, as Weber Alarcón did. She says it was to warn other residents of the agency’s impunity.

“I sent it to everyone that I could, because I saw the disrespect that was given to our local police officers,” Weber Alarcón said. “That’s what I was so in fear of, myself. I was like, ‘Then that means we’re not safe at all. If our police officers here can’t help us, who’s going to help us?’” 

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