ICE agents shot into a moving vehicle Tuesday during a Central Valley traffic stop, the latest in a string of shootings that have polarized the country amid an ongoing immigration crackdown since the beginning of 2025.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons said in a statement that agents attempted to stop a man who Lyons alleged is a gang member wanted in El Salvador in connection to a murder.
The man, Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run an officer over.” An agent responded with “defensive shots,” Lyons said, and the man was taken to a hospital. Lyons’ announcement did not immediately make clear whether Hernandez had been struck by the gunfire.
Official statements did not immediately clarify where either Mendoza Hernandez or the agents were from. The sheriff of Stanislaus County, where the incident occurred, said no local law enforcement officials were involved in the shooting about 6:30 Tuesday morning.
The Stockton ICE Field Office includes Stanislaus County in its area of coverage, though Official statements did not immediately clarify where either Mendoza Hernandez or the agents were from.
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Video published by KCRA-TV, which the station said was captured on a dashboard camera at the scene of the shooting, shows a vehicle at a roadside, flanked by armed agents who appear to try to reach inside. The driver backs the vehicle into an unmarked pickup truck sitting behind it on the roadside. Then, the driver pulls forward again as agents spread out. At least one officer appears to fire into the car, which drives over the median into a lane with oncoming traffic.
The video doesn’t clearly show who is driving, or if anyone else is inside the car. Stocktonia could not immediately verify the details of the video, though aerial footage posted by ICE shows the same area depicted in the dashboard video.
According to an analysis by NBC News, ICE agents were involved in 14 shootings between September 2025 and February 2026.
Descriptions of the incident invoked some of the same language that has been called into question in other violent encounters with immigration agents, triggering some in the region to make immediate calls for greater transparency.
While Lyons’ statement did not elaborate on the allegation of gang membership, ICE descriptions of the gang affiliation of deported migrants has repeatedly been called into question. has a repeated history of assigning gang affiliation to immigrants without a history of criminal activity. Hundreds of Venezuelan asylum seekers were deported to maximum security prisons in El Salvador last year, some of whom were identified by ICE as gang members. Many of those cases were later challenged in court, where documents revealed agents relied on evidence such as everyday tattoos to accuse people of gang membership.
The Salvadoran government has also faced accusations of mislabeling people as gang members. Since 2022, 90,000 people in the country have been arrested on suspicion of gang membership under an emergency policy that allows widespread arrests, though human rights organizations say many of these people are likely innocent.
In other officer-involved shootings this year, ICE initially announced that agents fired in self-defense, before video evidence emerges that contradicts this narrative. On Jan. 7, an ICE agent shot and killed bystander Renee Good in Minneapolis by firing into her car. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the agent was responding to “an act of domestic terrorism.” Officials made similar claims about Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed a few weeks later.
Video of Good’s shooting, though, later showed her turning her vehicle away from agents rather than toward them.
Faith in the Valley, a community rapid response network tracking ICE activity and providing support to immigrants across the Central Valley, urged their supporters to call their local and state representatives to demand clarity about the shooting.
“We deserve transparency and answers,” the organization said in a statement, adding that “incidents like this create fear, mistrust, and real harm – especially for immigrant families who already feel targeted.”
In a media conference Tuesday afternoon, Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse said “the FBI has assumed primary responsibility for the investigation,” since the shooting involved a federal agency.
FBI Sacramento Acting Special Agent Eugene Wu said the agency is conducting a “thorough methodical investigation to understand what transpired prior to today’s shooting” and asked
the public to send in any videos captured of the incident to their hotline 800-CALL-FBI.
Lillian Perlmutter covers immigration for Stocktonia and NEWSWELL.