Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero pulled out of his apartment complex to start a DoorDash shift on the icy roads of St. Paul four days before Christmas, during the early stages of Operation Metro Surge.
The immigration agents — two in a blue Ford Expedition and four in a white Dodge Durango — had run Rodriguez Romero’s license plate, and upon learning he was a Cuban national with a pending asylum case, decided to arrest him. Rodriguez Romero pulled over, and the agents surrounded his white Toyota 4Runner, ordering him to get out of the vehicle. He refused, and after the agents threatened to break his driver’s side window, he drove away.
The agents hopped back in their cars and pursued Rodriguez Romero as he circled back towards his apartment. As he pulled into the parking lot, he hit two parked cars and came to a stop. The agents again surrounded him — this time with guns drawn — and as Rodriguez Romero started up again toward the apartment’s main entrance, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired two shots at his car.
Here, the government and defendants’ stories diverge: either the immigration agents in the Durango rammed into Rodriguez Romero’s car from behind, pushing it into the feds’ Expedition; or, as the government claims, Rodriguez Romero reversed into the Durango before shifting into drive and ramming into the back of the Explorer, pinning an agent between the vehicles.
Rodriguez Romero then ran into his apartment building, where the officers caught up with him, handcuffed him and drove him to the Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling.
Rodriguez Romero is now facing three federal felony charges: two counts of assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon — his car — and one count of assault on a federal officer, for allegedly biting the hand of an ICE officer while being arrested inside the apartment building.
No video has emerged of the events leading up to Rodriguez Romero’s arrest on Dec. 21. The evidence provided by the government so far largely consists of interviews with the agents on the scene, who contradict each other on key details. The government has produced a video of Rodriguez Romero’s arrest and a handful of photos from the aftermath: the smashed cars, an agent’s injured finger, and hand-drawn maps depicting the scene of the incident.
ICE officials and officers have misled the public before about similar incidents. The agency did not respond to the Reformer’s request for comment.
The DHS Story
DHS said that Rodriguez Romero hit an officer with his car two times: first during the initial traffic stop as he was pulling away, and a second time in the apartment parking lot.
“Romero began ramming his car into an ICE vehicle and struck ANOTHER ICE officer,” the post reads. “The officer who was struck by Romero’s car defensively fired two rounds from his service weapon, causing Romero to drive off again.”
The narrative posted on X is contradicted by interviews with agents on the scene, according to court filings from Rodriguez Romero’s attorney, Bruce Nestor.
An ICE agent who initiated the traffic stop, Morales, said in an interview immediately after the incident that Rodriguez Romero’s car “almost hit” his partner, Ibanez, as he drove away for the first time, according to court filings which referred to the agents by their last names.
Three of the four other agents on the scene interviewed on Dec. 21 did not say their Ibanez was hit by the car at that time. The fourth said he saw Rodriguez Romero’s car hit Ibanez, and that Ibanez was “staggering and grabbing his lower body/abdomen area.”
Officials waited until February to interview Ibanez. He said then that the driver’s side mirror of the 4Runner hit him in the shoulder area, causing 3 out of 10 pain.
Most of the agents’ interviews also contradict the order of events as described by DHS on X the day of the shooting.
Five of the six agents said Ibanez fired the shots at Rodriguez Romero in the parking lot before the collision with the two federal vehicles, according to filings by Rodriguez Romero’s attorney. Only Morales described Rodriguez Romero ramming cars before Ibanez fired his gun.
Two of the agents in the Durango said their vehicle struck Rodriguez Romero’s 4Runner from behind.
DHS Has Misled Public About Assaults Before
Before thousands of immigration agents swarmed Minnesota, they carried out similar, smaller operations in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Law enforcement officers arrested more than 100 protesters in Los Angeles in the summer of 2025 on suspicion of assaulting or interfering with a law enforcement officer, but many of the accusations against protesters could not be substantiated. An April investigation by ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that federal prosecutors quickly discontinued more than a third of the cases by dismissing charges or declining to file them in the first place. Many other defendants pled guilty to misdemeanors.
In October, an immigration agent fired five shots at Marimar Martinez in Chicago, accusing her of ramming ICE vehicles with her own. In a statement that day, DHS referred to her as a “domestic terrorist” who “ambushed” officers.
Six weeks later, the federal government dropped the charges against Martinez. Bodycam footage released in February shows federal agents swerving into Martinez’s car before opening fire — the opposite of what the government claimed in the initial charges.
U.S. District Judge Sarah Ellis, who reviewed footage of a Chicago car crash involving ICE as part of a lawsuit challenging the agency’s tactics, said in a January ruling that the video “suggests that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force.”
As in the Rodriguez Romero incident, Department of Homeland Security officers have engaged numerous times in a tactic that’s against police policy in most of America’s biggest cities: Shooting at moving vehicles. When ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in her car in south Minneapolis in January, that was the ninth shooting by an immigration officer in the previous four months, and all of them involved firing at people in vehicles, as the New York Times reported then.
After Good’s killing, agents fired shots at Julio Sosa-Celis and Alfredo Aljorna in north Minneapolis, hitting Aljorna in the leg. The agents claimed the men had assaulted them, and that the shots were fired in self-defense. The U.S. Department of Justice charged Sosa-Celis and Aljorna with assaulting a federal officer.
Surveillance footage recovered from the scene later revealed that the agents’ statements were false. The agents were placed on leave in February, and the DOJ quickly dropped the charges against Aljorna and Sosa-Celis.
Finally, on the day of the federal killing of Alex Pretti in south Minneapolis, DHS asserted that Pretti, a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry, “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Video showed he was disarmed before he was shot to death.
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