Man Killed in Michigan Car Crash Was Not the Target of ICE Search

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/michigan-car-crash-ice-immigration-grand-rapids.html?unlocked_article_code=1.D1E.CAR-.0Q6otnqak4Dw&smid=url-share

A Guatemalan man who died in a car crash in Michigan after federal immigration agents attempted to question him this week was not the person that agents were looking for, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.

The man who died, Mario David Coronado Juarez, was driving a car registered to the person being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Sunday, the agency said in a statement. Mr. Coronado Juarez was a Guatemalan national who was in the United States illegally, the statement said.

According to the agency’s account, ICE agents attempted to stop the car that Mr. Coronado Juarez was driving in the city of Grand Rapids. They were looking for an undocumented immigrant “with multiple alcohol related driving offenses who is also wanted in Guatemala for a drunk and disorderly charge,” according to D.H.S.

At that point, Mr. Coronado Juarez fled at a high speed, the authorities said, and the ICE officers “discontinued the enforcement action.”

Mr. Coronado Juarez, who was the sole occupant of the vehicle, crashed into a tree about a half mile away, the agency said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Mr. Coronado Juarez had previously been removed from the United States in 2021 and re-entered the country at an unknown date and location, the statement said.

Attempts to reach representatives and family members of Mr. Coronado Juarez on Thursday were not successful.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, has ordered a state investigation into his death.

The incident in Michigan was the latest in a series of attempted ICE arrests in recent months that have resulted in violence, death and injury, alarming advocates for immigrants who fear that federal agents are intensifying enforcement across the country.

In Austin, Texas, this week, an immigration agent shot an immigrant from Venezuela in his vehicle. That man, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, was hospitalized and then released into ICE custody.

In Evanston, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, a U.S. citizen was left with injuries to his head, neck and teeth after he was mistakenly detained by immigration agents last weekend, according to the local police.

In July, a 28-year-old man running from immigration agents at a gas station in St. Augustine, Fla., was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer. Days before that, an immigration agent in Biddeford, Maine, shot and killed a man in a car. Also in early July, an ICE agent fatally shot a Mexican immigrant, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during a traffic stop in Houston.

Movimiento Cosecha GR, an advocacy group in Grand Rapids, said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Coronado Juarez was 35 and had a wife and children in Guatemala.

“Mario deserves to be remembered not only for the way he died, but for the life he lived: a father, a husband, a brother, and a person deeply loved by his family and his community,” the group said.