San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones is urging Congress to investigate the 2025 killing of Ruben Ray Martinez by an HSI agent.
The mayor of San Antonio, Gina Ortiz Jones, has asked Congress to open an investigation into the March 2025 killing of 23‑year‑old Ruben Ray Martinez by a Homeland Security Investigation agent on South Padre Island, saying that Martinez’s family “deserve answers and transparency around his death,” according to aMartinez was a U.
S. citizen from San Antonio who had traveled to South Padre Island to celebrate his 23rd birthday,, HSI agents—along with local police—were redirecting traffic at the scene of a crash when they encountered Martinez’s vehicle.Significant Incident Report confirmed that the HSI agents had asked Martinez—who was driving a blue, four-door Ford car—to slow down. But instead of doing so, the report said, Martinez accelerated and ran into an agent, who ended up on the hood of the vehicle, prompting another HSI agent to fire multiple rounds through the driver’s side window.: “A driver of a blue Ford intentionally ran over a Homeland Security Investigation special agent…Upon witnessing this, another agent fired defensive shots to protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public.”Martinez was taken to Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville, where he was later pronounced dead, the report said. His passenger was taken into custody by South Padre Island police, and the struck agent was hospitalized with a knee injury.Martinez’s death was initially reported by various local news outlets as an officer‑involved shooting, but authorities did not publicly disclose ICE’s role in the incident for nearly a year, and the federal agency’s involvement only became public after the watchdog group American Oversight shared DHS recordsthat: “It is critical that there is a full and fair investigation into why HSI was present at the scene of a traffic collision and why a federal officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen as he was trying to comply with instructions from the local law enforcement officers directing traffic.” “We deserve to know what happened,” Jones said in an interview with News 4 San Antonio. “Everybody in our community deserves to be safe, no matter who they are—and they certainly deserve answers when somebody, one of their loved ones, one of their neighbors, is killed.”, Jones said, “The delay in providing answers to the Martinez family and to the community only makes our neighbors wonder: ‘How many more Ruben Ray Martinezes are out there, and how many more could there be?’”, Martinez’s mother—Rachel Reyes—said: “Since Ruben’s death a year ago, all we have wanted is justice for him, and we have struggled with the silence surrounding his killing…It’s my hope that attention being raised now into Ruben’s death will help bring the justice we want for him and the answers we haven’t had.”, ours is different: The Courageous Center—it's not"both sides," it's sharp, challenging and alive with ideas. We follow facts, not factions. If that sounds like the kind of journalism you want to see thrive, we need you., you support a mission to keep the center strong and vibrant. Members enjoy: Ad-free browsing, exclusive content and editor conversations.
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