THE REACTION GAP
Part One of Three
This is the first installment in a three-part ROTWR Special Report series examining a documented pattern: how American institutions and media respond to violent death, and how that response changes depending on who died. Part One examines the reaction gap between comparable cases. Parts Two and Three, in the installments ahead, turn from who gets remembered to who gets believed, and from individual cases to the system behind them.
For nearly a year, almost no one outside a small circle of family and lawyers knew the name Ruben Ray Martinez.
On March 15, 2025, Martinez, a 23-year-old San Antonio man and United States citizen, was celebrating his birthday with his best friend, Joshua Orta, on South Padre Island. Just after midnight, the two drove toward a busy intersection where a car crash had closed the road. Officers from multiple agencies were on scene, including a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit operating under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A Texas game warden signaled Martinez to pull over. Body camera footage later showed his brake lights on, his car barely moving. Seconds later, an HSI agent, later identified as Jack Stevens, fired multiple shots through the driver’s-side window. Orta, sitting beside him, heard Martinez say “I’m sorry” before he slumped back in his seat.
Martinez died at a Brownsville hospital. The agent was not wearing a body camera. Local reporting at the time did not identify federal or ICE involvement in his death at all. That fact stayed buried until February 2026, when the watchdog group American Oversight obtained internal ICE records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and Newsweek reported them under the headline “Public Didn’t Know for a Year.”
Orta was the only eyewitness who disputed the government’s account. He told investigators the car was “barely moving” and that he did not believe Martinez intended to hit anyone. In a written statement given to the family’s attorneys, he wrote, “Without giving any warning, commands, or opportunity to comply, the agent fired multiple shots at Ruben from an extremely close distance, no more than two feet.” Orta died in an unrelated car crash in February 2026, months before that statement became public.
A Texas grand jury declined to indict Stevens in late February 2026, a decision known as a “no bill,” meaning the jurors found insufficient grounds to bring criminal charges. Texas state senator Roland Gutierrez said on social media that he believed the shooting was part of a pattern of targeting Latinos, and accused the Texas Department of Public Safety of concealing the agency’s involvement for nearly a year. Congressional Democrats Robert Garcia and Greg Casar sent a formal letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Inspector General demanding an investigation not just into the shooting, but into DHS’s concealment of it.
Martinez was the first person killed by a federal immigration agent during the second Trump administration. He would not be the last. He would also not be the most publicized.
THE NAMES THAT FOLLOWED
That September, an ICE officer shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a 38-year-old Mexican national and father of two, during a traffic stop in Franklin Park, a Chicago suburb. DHS said Villegas González, described as having “a history of reckless driving,” dragged an agent with his car and seriously injured him. An NBC News review of public records found Villegas González had never been criminally charged and had pleaded guilty to four traffic violations, the most recent in 2013. The ICE agent involved wore no body camera. Footage came instead from local police, and it captured that same agent describing his own injuries as “nothing major.” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker cited the discrepancy publicly, saying the video “brought to light” a mismatch between what DHS claimed and what happened.
A state body, the Illinois Accountability Commission, later reviewed the case and concluded there is “reasonable cause to believe that federal agents shot and killed Villegas González without apparent justification,” citing DHS’s own policy prohibiting agents from firing at moving vehicles solely to disable them. The Illinois State Police opened an independent investigation in May 2026, eight months after the shooting, after the FBI, the case’s nominal lead investigator, never publicly released findings. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called for an investigation. Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Affairs condemned the killing.
On December 11, 2025, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Isaias Sanchez Barboza, a 31-year-old Mexican citizen, near Rio Grande City, Texas. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) own incident summary describes a two-minute “active struggle” in brush near the riverbank before the agent radioed for help and opened fire, striking Sanchez Barboza three times. The agent has never been publicly named. The Texas Rangers and CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility are both reviewing the shooting.
Twenty days later, on New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old father of two, outside his apartment complex in Northridge, a Los Angeles suburb. Porter had been firing a rifle into the air, a common if illegal local practice for ringing in the new year, according to neighbors who spoke at his vigil. DHS said the agent heard the gunfire, went to investigate, and shot Porter after he did not comply with an order to lower the weapon. The agent’s identity was never officially released by DHS. It surfaced months later only because an attorney in an unrelated child-custody dispute identified him in court filings as ICE Officer Brian Palacios, whose girlfriend’s children separately alleged in that filing that he had a history of physically disciplining his own children with a belt and making racist remarks about Black and Latino people. No charges have been filed.
THIS WEEK
On Monday, in Biddeford, Maine, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian delivery driver authorized to work in the United States, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. He was not the intended target of the arrest warrant agents were serving. He left behind a wife and a young daughter. No agency involved was wearing a body camera. A neighbor told reporters he saw a federal SUV ram Guerrero’s car multiple times before the shooting, and that he heard Guerrero say “I tried to stop” as he was pulled from the vehicle. The officer has been placed on administrative leave. The FBI, Maine State Police, and the Maine Attorney General’s office are all investigating.
Days earlier, in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the United States for decades, was shot and killed by an ICE officer in his work van after picking up coworkers for a construction job. DHS said officers believed he resembled a different, wanted man. DHS later confirmed he was not the intended target. An attorney representing two men who were in the van with him said the ICE officer fired through the passenger-side window while the van was already parked.
Guerrero and Salgado Araujo join Martinez, Villegas González, and Sanchez Barboza on a list that keeps growing, and that most Americans could not name a single entry from without searching for it.
THE COMPARISON
Renée Nicole Macklin Good could be found by nearly anyone who was following the news in January.
Good, 37, a white American citizen, poet, and mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, during a federal operation known as Operation Metro Surge. DHS said she had “weaponized” her vehicle against the agent and called the incident an “act of domestic terrorism.” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz publicly disputed that account. Bystander video, later analyzed by multiple outlets, showed Good’s car turning away from the agent, not toward him, in the moment he opened fire. Her killing drew a joint statement from the Minneapolis City Council, vigils within hours, and sustained coverage across CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, ABC, and Al Jazeera. ABC News published a millisecond-by-millisecond forensic breakdown of the video evidence.
Seventeen days later, on January 24, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, a white ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA, was shot and killed by CBP officers while checking on a woman agents had pushed to the ground during a protest. White House officials, including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, publicly called Pretti a “would-be assassin” who tried to “massacre” law enforcement. Bystander video, reviewed by The New York Times, showed him face-down on the ground when agents opened fire, and that at least ten shots were fired within five seconds as he lay motionless. Pretti’s death triggered protests in Minneapolis, Boston, Los Angeles, and multiple Wisconsin cities, drawing more than 400 people to a single vigil in Tacoma. Nurses’ associations in multiple states issued formal statements condemning the killing. Members of Congress from both parties weighed in. The National Governors Association issued a statement.
As of this week, months after Good and Pretti died, Minnesota prosecutors have only just obtained federal evidence in their cases that the government had withheld, according to PBS. No charges have been filed against any agent involved in either death. The investigations remain active, and the pressure to complete them has not let up.
Good and Pretti’s deaths were contested in the same way Guerrero’s, Salgado Araujo’s, Martinez’s, and Villegas González’s were. DHS offered a self-defense account. Video and witness testimony complicated it. No independent proof settled the matter either way at the time. What differed, measurably, was the reaction: the size of the protests, the speed and volume of official statements, the duration of sustained investigative pressure, and how many Americans could recall the victim’s name a week later.
THE COUNT ITSELF IS CONTESTED
Even the basic body count is disputed. Al Jazeera, reporting July 13 and 14, counted at least nine deaths tied to federal immigration enforcement operations since the start of the second Trump administration, noting explicitly that not every one of those deaths occurred during a standard ICE operation. The Guardian, as cited by the Bangor Daily News on July 13, put the figure at “at least the 11th fatal shooting involving ICE or U.S. Border Patrol agents,” a broader count that includes incidents where an agent, not a civilian, was the one shot. Other trackers, including The Week and The American Prospect, have published their own running counts, each using different criteria for what counts as an immigration-enforcement death and none matching exactly.
That outlets cannot agree on a single number, more than a year and a half into an active pattern of federal agents killing people during immigration operations, is itself a measure of how little sustained attention most of these deaths have received individually.
A DOCUMENTED PATTERN
None of this is a new phenomenon. In 2004, PBS journalist Gwen Ifill coined a term for a version of it that broadcasters had been living out for years, calling it “missing white woman syndrome.” At a journalism conference that year, Ifill said, “If there is a missing white woman we’re going to cover that every day.”
The theory sat mostly undocumented until 2016, when Northwestern University researcher Zach Sommers tested it empirically. Using Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) missing-persons data as a baseline and a dataset built from four major news sites, Sommers found the disparity was real and measurable in two distinct ways. Black Americans made up 35.25 percent of the missing-persons population in his study’s baseline data, but only 22.97 percent of who received any news coverage at all. When Sommers measured coverage intensity, meaning how many articles a case generated once it was covered, not just whether it was covered once, the gap widened. Black subjects accounted for just 12.73 percent of article-level coverage. Controlling for age and hometown demographics, Sommers found that Black missing persons received news coverage at roughly 41 percent the rate of white missing persons. Black women specifically received coverage at about 36 percent the rate of white women in an otherwise comparable case, while white women alone accounted for nearly half of all article-level coverage in his entire dataset.
Sommers studied missing-persons cases, not fatal shootings by federal agents. The pattern his research documented, a measurable gap in whether a story is told at all and how loudly it is told once it is, is the same shape now visible in who gets a name people remember and who does not.
Rachel Reyes, Ruben Ray Martinez’s mother, spoke to NPR in April, more than a year after her son died and two months after the public first learned an ICE agent had killed him. “It never made sense to me,” she said. “Ruben wouldn’t use his car to hurt anyone, ever.”
Part Two of this series turns from who gets remembered to who gets believed. It examines a separate, related pattern: cases involving Black and Latino victims where the cause of death was ruled on fast, and where families and their attorneys have had to fight for months, sometimes years, just to get that ruling questioned. Some of those families are still fighting.
Sources: Newsweek (US — Martinez case concealment, FOIA disclosure); The Texas Tribune (US — Martinez bodycam review, Orta account, family details); NPR (US — Reyes quote, Orta written statement); Newsweek (US — grand jury no-bill); Congressman Casar’s office (US primary source — Congressional IG letter); Wikipedia: Killing of Silverio Villegas González (aggregated sourcing — case overview, Sheinbaum and Mexican government response); NBC News (US — bodycam footage, Pritzker quote, Villegas González record review); Capitol News Illinois (US — Illinois Accountability Commission finding, state police investigation); FOX 26 Houston (US — Sanchez Barboza shooting); U.S. Customs and Border Protection (US primary source — CBP’s own incident summary); PBS NewsHour (US — Sanchez Barboza identification, Porter case, casualty count context); ABC7 Los Angeles (US — Porter case, agent identification via custody filings); The Mirror US (UK — Palacios allegations from custody filing); Bangor Daily News (US — Biddeford shooting, Fecteau statement); CBS News (US — Biddeford witness account, lack of bodycams); Associated Press via KESQ (US — Salgado Araujo and Guerrero case details, pattern context); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — nine-death count); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Guerrero case, casualty count methodology); Killing of Renée Good, Wikipedia (aggregated sourcing — case overview); NBC News (US — Good case, Walz response); ABC News (US — forensic video timeline); Killing of Alex Pretti, Wikipedia (aggregated sourcing — case overview, Miller and Bovino quotes); Democracy Now! (US, independent — protest details, Fateh quote); The New York Times (US — video shot analysis); PBS NewsHour (US — withheld evidence, six-month investigation status); Bangor Daily News, citing The Guardian (US/UK — eleven-shooting count); Zach Sommers, Missing White Woman Syndrome: An Empirical Analysis of Race and Gender Disparities in Online News Coverage of Missing Persons, 106 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 275 (2016), Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (academic primary source — all coverage disparity statistics)
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
