Lawyer Says ICE Agents Shot California Man Before He Tried to Flee

The attorney for a man shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during a targeted vehicle stop in California's Central Valley said Thursday that agents opened fire on his client before Mendoza Hernandez attempted to flee, directly contradicting the federal government's account of a defensive shooting.

Patrick Kolasinski, who represents Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, 36, sharpened his challenge to ICE's version of the April 7 encounter on Interstate 5 near Patterson, a city about 75 miles southeast of San Francisco. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons had said agents fired "defensive shots" only after Mendoza Hernandez "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run an officer over." Kolasinski says the dashcam footage tells a different story.

Dashcam video obtained by Sacramento television station KCRA shows three agents standing around Mendoza Hernandez's stopped vehicle at approximately 6:30 a.m. One officer appears to be at the driver-side window when the car begins to back up and turn. At that moment, the officer at the window draws his weapon and appears to fire. The vehicle then strikes a car parked behind it. Only after the shots are fired does the vehicle pull forward in the direction of officers before crossing the highway median. Kolasinski said an agent also pulled open the car door as Mendoza Hernandez attempted to move the vehicle away. "That may well be ICE training, but if it is it's horrible training," he said. He added that the footage reminded him of Renee Good, the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis while driving away from agents.

The sequence captured on video is central to the use-of-force dispute. ICE maintains that the forward motion of the vehicle after shots were fired proves Mendoza Hernandez used the car as a weapon. Kolasinski counters that the forward movement came as a reaction to being shot, not as an attack. "It's natural for him to try to flee," he said. "It's a human reaction."

The FBI is leading the investigation. The Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office confirmed it had no involvement in the operation.

Beyond the force question, Kolasinski also disputed the underlying basis for the arrest. DHS described Mendoza Hernandez as an 18th Street Gang member wanted in El Salvador in connection with a murder. But a court document from El Salvador dated October 25, 2019, shows that Mendoza Hernandez, then 29, was charged with aggravated homicide, a charge later reduced to simple homicide, and was acquitted and ordered immediately released. The document references at least one convicted 18th Street Gang member among the other defendants but contains no mention of Mendoza Hernandez belonging to a gang. "If he was released after being acquitted, with no other holds on him, he cannot have a warrant," Kolasinski said. "So that information must be either erroneous or completely made up. And only DHS knows what they're looking at."

Mendoza Hernandez's fiancée, who gave only her first name, Cindy, said he had no criminal record in the United States and had been stopped only for minor traffic infractions, including for a cracked windshield days before the shooting. The couple have a daughter who will turn 2 this summer. Cindy and Kolasinski said that law enforcement officials and hospital staff initially refused to let them see Mendoza Hernandez or communicate how many times he was shot. As of Wednesday evening he was in stable condition at a hospital in Modesto and had been taken into surgery.

DHS has cited more than 180 vehicle attacks on federal immigration officers since the start of President Trump's second term as justification for agents' use of defensive force. The Patterson shooting is one of several ICE confrontations during the administration's immigration enforcement push in which federal accounts of the encounter have been publicly challenged. Whether existing oversight mechanisms, including an FBI probe and any body camera or dashcam review, will produce an independent accounting of what happened near the Interstate 5 on-ramp that morning remains to be seen.