A man was hit and killed on a Southern California freeway Thursday while he was running from an immigration raid at a Home Depot, authorities said.
Dylan Feik, the city manager of Monrovia, in Los Angeles County about 10 miles northeast of Pasadena, said a police officer saw the raid after the police department received a call about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area.
During the activity, someone ran onto the 210 Freeway, he said. Shortly afterward, the fire department and emergency workers responded to a call of a vehicle hitting a pedestrian.
The person was taken to a hospital and died from injuries sustained in the incident, Feik said.
The California Highway Patrol said that the victim was a man and that the circumstances around his death are under investigation. His identity has not been publicly released.
Video recorded moments after the accident shows a man in a black T-shirt lying near the inside lane of the freeway.
Vincent Enriquez, who recorded the video, said he thought at first it was a motorcycle accident.
“I was kind of confused on how he was on the freeway laying down,” he said. “I assumed either he was hit by a car trying to cross or he must’ve gotten out of the vehicle from a car accident.”
The Department of Homeland Security denied its agents chased the person and said they do not know the person’s legal status.
“This individual was not being pursued by any DHS law enforcement,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We were not aware of this incident or notified by California Highway Patrol until hours after operations in the area had concluded.”
Feik said that the city did not have any additional information about the operation, including about any possible detentions, and that Monrovia has not received any communication from ICE.
Palmira Figueroa, spokesperson for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said 13 workers were detained during the raid. “It was a violent, aggressive bust,” she said. “Some of them were chasing workers in cars while they were running away.”
Network organizers are trying to reach family members, as well as the other men who were detained, Figueroa said.
Videos posted on social media appear to show agents detaining a person in the parking lot of the Home Depot, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the immigration activity.
State Assemblymember John Harabedian, whose district includes Monrovia, said in a statement on his Instagram story that 10 people were detained in the raid.
“Raids like this do not make our streets safer — they terrorize families, instill fear, and put lives at risk,” he said.
Immigration officials have concentrated many of their raids on Home Depots and other home improvement retailers that day laborers are known to frequent.
On Tuesday, Enforcement Removal Operations agents conducted a “targeted enforcement operation” at a Home Depot in Washington, D.C., as a part of the Trump administration’s wider crackdown on immigrants and homeless people in the city.
An appeals court this month maintained a Los Angeles federal judge’s temporary restraining order that bars immigration agents from using people’s spoken languages or jobs, like day laborer, or their presence at particular locations as the sole pretext to detain them.
