New York Times reports undisclosed ICE shooting kills US citizen Ruben Ray Martinez in Texas

A New York Times investigation reports that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed an American citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, during an operation in March—an incident his family says occurred in near-total secrecy, with basic details withheld for months. The Times says the shooting was “undisclosed,” leaving relatives and the public to reconstruct events from fragments rather than official transparency.

That information vacuum is not an accident of bureaucracy; it is a feature of how immigration enforcement has evolved in the US. ICE is nominally a civil immigration agency, yet it increasingly operates with the posture, equipment, and tactical habits of a paramilitary force. When something goes wrong—especially when the target is the wrong person—the institutional incentives align around delay, opacity, and procedural insulation.

The core concern is not merely that a lethal use of force occurred, but that the public cannot readily learn what happened, who authorized what, and what rules governed the encounter. In ordinary law enforcement, secrecy already comes too easily. In immigration enforcement, it comes with an extra layer of ambiguity: overlapping jurisdictions, shifting operational authorities, and a political environment where “border security” is treated as a trump card against accountability.

The Times account also highlights a pattern visible in other recent immigration stories: the state’s systems often punish compliance and reward evasion. When enforcement agencies can convert routine contact into detention, or conduct operations with minimal disclosure, the predictable result is less trust, less cooperation, and more fear-driven behavior. That may be politically useful—crisis justifies budgets—but it is corrosive to rule-of-law norms.

A second report from Norway’s VG also describes the killing of a US citizen by immigration police, but it is not an English-language source and cannot be used as a primary reference for the English edition. Still, the very fact that international media is filling gaps left by US authorities illustrates the reputational cost of domestic secrecy.

If ICE had a strong factual case for the shooting, transparency would be the agency’s friend. Instead, the public gets the familiar choreography: limited statements, delayed timelines, and internal review processes that function as a holding pattern until attention moves on.

The US can have immigration enforcement, or it can have a system that behaves like a legally constrained public service. Trying to do both by granting civil agencies coercive power while tolerating operational darkness is how you end up with an American citizen dead—and a government that treats the details as optional.