Police investigate the death of a man on State Road 16 who was running from ICE agents. | St. Johns County Sheriffs Office
Published on July 14, 2026 at 6:04 pm
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A man running from immigration agents died Tuesday when a tractor-trailer hit him on State Road 16 in St. Augustine.
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations stopped the 28-year-old man and three others just after 6:30 a.m. near the Wawa gas station east of Interstate 95, Highway Patrol Sgt. Dylan Bryan said.
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All four people bolted, and one was hit and killed.
The death came during a period of increasing scrutiny over ICE enforcement actions across the country. Agents on Monday shot and killed a man in his car in Biddeford, Maine. Last week, an ICE agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant during a traffic stop in Houston.
The Trump administration has ordered a halt to most ICE traffic stops after the two deaths, the New York Times reported Tuesday.
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In St. Augustine, the four men had been inside a vehicle parked at the gas station, and all of them began to flee. One of them crossed the state road in front of the truck and was hit near Inman Road.
State troopers sent to the scene found the unidentified man dead on the road near Wawa. The truck driver was not hurt.
Police did not release the dead man’s identity. The location of the three other people is unknown, Bryan, the Highway Patrol spokesman, said. The vehicle they were in was towed from the scene.
The Highway Patrol is investigating the traffic death, but no other information was released, including how the four people had come into contact with ICE.
Jacksonville Today spoke Tuesday to a Homeland Security spokesman at the Tampa Field Office, then emailed questions, but the office had not responded by evening.
Criticism of ICE
Jonathan Gonzalo Kleinick, co-founder of the Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance, lamented an increase in ICE activities locally and nationwide.
“In all these situations in the past year and a half now of ICE crackdowns around the country, it has created a whole lot of fear among all sorts of folks, regardless of where they are from, regardless of their immigration or legal status,” Kleinick said. “There’s a lot of fear because a lot of these happen as a result of things like racial profiling. And that tells a lot of folks in the U.S. that they may be a target because of just how they look.”
The Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance held a protest Saturday at Beach Boulevard and Parental Home Road to demand an end to what they called escalated raids in Jacksonville. They also joined many other immigration support groups to protest the shooting last week of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for decades.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate, condemned the actions of ICE agents.
“My heart breaks for the family and loved ones of the person who lost their life this morning in St. Johns County,” she said in a released statement. “As the horrifying details of this crash come to light, one thing is abundantly clear: this tragedy is a direct result of an out-of-control agency terrorizing our communities and our state.”
