A man was killed on Tuesday morning while running from U.S. immigration officers in Florida, according to a spokesperson for the state highway patrol, marking the third death in a week involving encounters with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents.
The man and three others were inside a vehicle in the parking lot of a gas station and convenience store in St. Augustine shortly before 7 a.m. when they had an “encounter” with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Florida Highway Patrol spokesperson Sgt. Dylan Bryan told multiple outlets.
All four men fled, according to Bryan. “The pedestrian was struck by the tractor trailer in the right lane and sustained fatal injuries on scene,” he said in a statement shared by The Guardian. “The tractor trailer immediately stopped and attempted to render aid to the victim.”
The man, who was reportedly 28 years old, has not been publicly identified. He was a Mexican national, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. It is unclear if he or the three other men involved in the “encounter” were the target of an immigration enforcement operation, or where the three others are following the incident.
The DHS spokesperson confirmed that law enforcement with the department “conducted an operation near St. Johns, Florida,” on Tuesday and said that HSI was investigating the incident in conjunction with the Florida Highway Patrol.
TIME has reached out to Florida Highway Patrol and ICE for further details.
The deadly encounter on Tuesday comes in the wake of two fatal shootings by ICE agents within less than a week that involved immigration officers attempting to stop someone in a vehicle. The deaths have sparked fierce backlash.
On July 7, an ICE officer shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for decades, during a traffic stop in Houston.
Six days later, another officer with the agency fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian national, while he was driving near his home in Biddeford, Maine.
DHS alleged that both drivers attempted to flee from immigration agents and that Araujo tried to run over an ICE officer with his vehicle. The department has not provided evidence for those claims.
Passengers in Araujo’s vehicle who witnessed the shooting have disputed DHS’s account of the incident, according to a lawyer who spoke with them.
One witness to the Maine shooting, Daniel Boucher, told the Portland Press Herald that Guerrero was “bleeding profusely from the head” upon being taken from his vehicle.
“He was talking. He said, ‘I tried to stop,’” Boucher said.
Amid the outcry over the two shootings, ICE ordered its agents on Tuesday to cease most vehicle stops in pursuit of undocumented immigrants, two sources familiar with the matter told TIME on Tuesday.
"We are always evaluating our procedures to keep our officers safe and criminals off our streets,” an ICE spokesperson said in a previous statement to TIME. “We will not disclose or discuss law enforcement tactics."
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