Ruben Ray Martinez was only twenty-three years old.

He worked at both Amazon and Walmart in San Antonio, Texas. He was on a spring break trip with his best friend on South Padre Island. It was close to his birthday. He’d had some drinks, failed to get into a club, and gone to Whataburger. He had Crown Royal, weed, and Xanax in his system, along with a blood alcohol content of 0.124. He was, by all definitions, legally impaired.

However, he did not deserve to die for it.

Please allow me to be precise about what was in Ruben Martinez’s system, because DHS and the people defending this shooting would love for you to imagine some feral, drug-crazed maniac behind the wheel. He had alcohol, marijuana, and alprazolam. Drugs designed to make you calmer for the most part. He wasn’t tweaked out on meth or rampaging on PCP. He was an inebriated twenty-three-year-old on spring break, barely moving through a chaotic intersection, jittery around police, and trying to turn his car around and leave.

HSI Supervisory Special Agent Jack Stevens shot him three times through the driver’s side window.

I want to be honest about the drunk driving because I have zero sympathy for drunk drivers. But the punishment for drunk driving, even in this country’s most punitive fever dreams, is not summary execution by a federal immigration agent at point-blank range through your car window. Ruben Martinez’s alleged crime that night did not warrant an extrajudicial killing. Not even close. And anyone trying to use his BAC as a justification for his death can stop reading now, because you’ve already told me everything I need to know about you. Plus, I have to wonder how many agents that were on scene that night have driven with similar or higher BACs. You know, because they can get out of it with the magic trinket they keep in their wallets.

Here is what the video shows.

Martinez’s Ford Focus is moving slowly through a chaotic intersection where a crash had shut things down. Officers from multiple agencies are present. At one point, an officer tells Martinez to keep going. Then other officers scream to stop him. He was given contradictory commands by law enforcement, set up to fail in real time by the very chaos surrounding him, and then killed for his confusion.

In the middle of that intersection, HSI Special Agent Hector Sosa claims Martinez accelerated into him, and he ended up on the hood. Stevens, standing at the driver’s side window, says he feared for Sosa’s life, for his own life, and for the lives of pedestrians, and specifically cited the 2025 New Orleans vehicle ramming attack as being “still fresh” in his mind.

A drunk twenty-three-year-old in a Ford Focus, barely moving, on spring break, equated to a terrorist attack according to the gun-happy snowflake.

The video does not show what Stevens and Sosa describe. Instead, it shows a car moving slowly while Sosa appears to be pressed against the front of the vehicle. At most the car would have caught his feet as it crept forward. The video shows no acceleration, no ramming, and no imminent deadly threat. And lastly, it shows Stevens firing three shots into the driver’s window with no warning and no commands immediately preceding the gunfire.

Joshua Orta, Martinez’s best friend and the only other person in that car, said Martinez never floored it and that the car was barely moving. He also said no officer was truly struck and that Stevens fired without giving any warning or commands.

Orta unfortunately died in an unrelated car crash before he could testify to a grand jury.

Speaking of the grand jury, working with whatever evidence it was actually given, they declined to indict Agent Stevens. ICE acting director Todd Lyons announced the agency stood by the decision. DHS issued a statement. Case closed. An American citizen was dead while nobody was charged or named for months.

And here is why you are only hearing about this now, a full year later.

DHS didn’t tell anyone. That is not an oversight. That was a choice, made deliberately, to conceal the fact that a federal immigration agent shot and killed an American citizen while directing traffic at a spring break resort town. Local media reported a shooting. They did not report that federal immigration agents were involved because nobody told them and because the government decided you didn’t need to know.

The only reason this case exists in the public consciousness at all is because the nonprofit watchdog American Oversight sued the government for documents and pried them loose. Not because DHS held a press conference or because ICE felt the public deserved transparency. Not because anyone in the federal government looked at the killing of a twenty-three-year-old American and decided accountability mattered. A lawsuit is what it took. A lawsuit along with eight months of silence, and then the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, which finally gave the national press a hook to revisit what happened to Ruben Martinez.

Think about that for a second. The only reason you know his name is that two other Americans had to die as well and a watchdog organization had to drag documents out of the government through litigation. Without American Oversight’s lawsuit and without the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez stays buried in almost every sense of the word. His family stays silent and ignored, and his name stays local while the agent who killed him stays unnamed. The cover-up holds.

Then there’s that phrase again, “defensive shots.”

DHS said Jack Stevens fired defensive shots at Ruben Ray Martinez. The same language Kristi Noem used when federal agents killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota. You know, when they ‘defensively’ fired multiple rounds into his back while he was already subdued on the ground.

I said it then and I’ll say it again now. There is no such thing as a defensive shot. A firearm is an offensive weapon. It is designed to kill. Pulling a trigger is not a shield. It is a decision to use lethal force against another human being. Calling it defensive is a linguistic sedative meant to anesthetize the public, pre-justify the killing, and short-circuit any moral response before it can fully form. Every time you let that phrase pass unchallenged, you are handing power another free kill.

Now let me ask a question I can’t stop thinking about.

What in the actual hell were federal immigration agents doing directing traffic after a car crash on South Padre Island?

How is that immigration enforcement? How does that fall under HSI’s jurisdiction in any coherent way? These are agents of the federal immigration apparatus, armed and operating under extraordinary legal insulation, and they inserted themselves into a local traffic situation in a resort town during spring break. Why? To what end?

I am not generally a conspiracy-minded man. But if I were, I might look at that setup and see something that looks a lot less like helpful civic participation and a lot more like a roadblock. A pretext to have federal agents surrounding cars and pulling people out in a situation where the normal rules of immigration enforcement don’t quite apply. A dry run, maybe. Or just an opportunity.

Because here’s what I can’t shake. Ruben Ray Martinez was killed on March 15, 2025. Renee Good was killed in Minneapolis 10 months later. And when I look at the architecture of justification used in all three killings, it is identical. Agents surrounded a vehicle. The driver panicked. The driver allegedly accelerated. Agents claimed their lives were in danger. Lethal force was used. The dead were smeared. DHS issued statements. Grand juries and internal reviews circled the wagons. The phrase defensive shots was deployed like a magic spell.

Ruben Martinez’s murder was not just a tragedy. It was a rehearsal.

The playbook was written in South Padre Island and then used again in Minneapolis. Claim the vehicle was a weapon and that the agent was in danger. Claim the shots were defensive. Bury the contradictory evidence as long as possible. Let the dead absorb the slander.

And then there is this.

Ruben Ray Martinez’s mother, Rachel Reyes, is a Trump voter. She supported this administration and believed in it. And when her son was killed by one of its agents and covered up for eight months, she got the same silence, the same smears, the same machinery of self-protection that the families of other victims got. Her politics did not protect her son, nor did her faith in the system. Nothing protected her son, because nothing was designed to.

Another question I have to ask is would Jack Stevens have been cleared by that grand jury if Ruben Martinez were white?

I don’t know. I can’t prove otherwise. But I know that Martinez’s case was buried for eight months while two white Americans had to die in Minneapolis before the country started paying attention to what ICE was doing. I know that it took Renee Good and Alex Pretti to put Ruben Martinez’s name in national headlines. I know that a young Hispanic man from San Antonio, drunk on his birthday trip, met the exact same fate as those two people, by the exact same playbook, and the country did not notice until the victims looked different.

That should sit with all of us for a long time.

Ruben Ray Martinez should be alive. Rachel Reyes should have her son. And none of us should need two white people to die before we start asking why a twenty-three-year-old Hispanic kid from San Antonio was shot three times through his car window and buried in silence for eight months.

Say his name.

(Sources)

• Texan shot dead by ICE agent months before killings in Minneapolis, records show
• Texas grand jury rejects indictments in fatal shooting of US citizen by federal immigration agent
• Footage, new records show what led to ICE shooting of San Antonio man on South Padre Island last year
• Gunshots in traffic: Why did DHS fatally shoot unarmed motorist in Texas?
• ‘We’re here to celebrate his life’ | Vigil in San Antonio marks 1 year since Ruben Ray Martinez’s death amid calls for independent investigation