Chicago ICE team seen threatening drivers has roamed from Illinois to Minnesota to Virginia

A shocking but familiar scene unfolded on Monday when federal agents pointed a gun in a woman’s face as she sat behind the wheel of her vehicle.

Two viral videos captured by the woman, Carolina Molina, show masked men cut off her car and jump out of their vehicles. 

Almost immediately, one of the agents points his firearm at her.

“I think my life was in danger at that point,” Molina said at a press conference on Wednesday in Northern Virginia. “It wasn’t until after I was like, this was a whole Renée Good situation again.”

The incident echoed the moments before Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent (ICE) Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year old Good in Minneapolis this past January. As has become common practice for federal agents surrounding drivers in their vehicles, the man who pointed his gun at Molina can be heard claiming she attempted to “run [them] over.” 

“You almost ran us over! Stop playing! You almost ran us over!” the agent with the gun said.

Molina’s dashcam video shows a different series of events, however. She slowly drives past the agents twice. On her second pass, the agents pull forward to cut her off and block her vehicle.

Unraveled has verified the agents in Molina’s videos were far from their usual base of operations. The team has been recorded inflicting violence on immigrants, protesters, and observers in the Chicago area since last summer, including outside the region’s ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that became the epicenter of anti-deportation protests during Operation Midway Blitz last autumn. Members of the same team were also recorded intimidating and threatening drivers in the Twin Cities in mid-January—in the brief period after federal agents killed Renée Good, and before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents killed 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.

Chicago: From immigration court to violence in Broadview

Elgin area ICE watchdog Ismael Cordová-Clough first identified 40-year-old Chicago native Martin Lagunas as the ICE agent in the Virginia video on social media one week ago.

Unraveled also independently verified Lagunas is a match for the man in the video through visual and voice analysis. He has a distinctive arm tattoo and wears a “POLICE” patch with a frayed middle thread across encounters. Other members of his Chicago ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) team have not been identified, but they appear together in videos of detentions spanning at least three states.

The videos from Molina’s encounter in Northern Virginia this week show several other familiar faces, including: a Black agent wearing a Chicago flag patch on his vest, a nearly bald agent with distinct thin-framed sunglasses, and an agent with dark hair in a long ponytail.

Unraveled reporters first encountered Lagunas, initially identified by the badge number 7880 in photos shared to the public Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Flickr photostream, in May 2025. He led a team abducting people from their mandatory appearances in Chicago’s immigration court at 55 E. Monroe Street.

On most days in late May and early June, Lagunas and his team lurked in the hallways of the court. Assisted by agents from other federal agencies, they swiftly transported detainees via unmarked vehicles from the building’s underground parking garage.

On June 4, agents inside court mistakenly arrested Cheikh Fall, after first erroneously attempting to detain a court interpreter. ICE’s error landed Fall in a Louisiana jail for three weeks and cost his family over $12,000 in legal fees.

Protests outside immigration court called attention to the near daily abductions. On June 16, at Lagunas’ direction, agents forcibly removed protesters from the entrance to the secure garage. ICE detained three of the protesters for hours, then released them without charges. Abductions at 55 E. Monroe then came to a virtual halt as building management restricted agents’ access to secured areas of the mixed-use commercial and residential building.

Through the rest of the summer and fall, Lagunas and his rotating team of agents transported detainees and faced off with protesters outside the ICE “processing” facility in nearby Broadview:

Lagunas also led his team’s response to a larger protest outside the Broadview facility on September 26, 2025. As people gathered in a large parking lot across the street from the building, federal agents shot protesters, reporters, and local elected officials with pepper ball launchers and other weapons. They lobbed tear gas canisters and fired 40mm foam rounds “without protesters appearing to pose any risk to agents,” according to an extensive report on the autumn protests from Human Rights Watch.

In 2026, the same crew has been involved in more violent encounters around the Chicago area.

On April 22, Lagunas intimidated an ICE observer on the Northwest Side. He accused her of stepping in front of a car while she stood on the curb next to a parked vehicle:

The observer, speaking anonymously, told Unraveled the killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good flashed through her mind in that moment. She feared for her life, especially as a visibly gender non-conforming person targeted by the administration.

“He said ‘ma’am,’ and then he looked at me and said ‘whatever you are.’ He was very offensive to me the way he spoke to me like that,” she said. “I was immediately reminded of Renée Good…and [her] being gay.”

“You’re gonna get run over…you’re purposefully trying to get in front of a moving car,” Lagunas said.

The documenter panned her camera down to show her feet on the sidewalk.

“He was trying to create a fake narrative, a lie about what was going on to make it seem like I was doing something wrong, which I was not. I felt absolutely threatened, like my life was in danger…and that he was ready to run me over,” she added. “It was unmistakably a threat against my life because I was recording him. This seems to be a specific strategy that many of them use; this absolutely alternate reality, comments that come out of their mouths that are literally not what’s happening. They’re the ones with the guns kidnapping people and killing people.”

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The balding ICE agent with thin sunglasses (seen in Virginia on Monday) was on-scene during a May 20 arrest in the Waukegan area that left a child behind in a car.

On June 2, ICE agents hit a woman’s car while chasing, tasing, and detaining a man on foot on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Video published by the Chicago Sun-Times shows the balding agent with sunglasses shove an onlooker, and then threaten the gathering crowd with his taser while agents wrestle with the man on the ground. Three days later, he was also seen in the O’Hare Airport credentialed rideshare lot checking drivers.

In the southwest suburb of Country Club Hills, witness video shows the balding agent among a group who chased a man into a police station on July 3. The man tries to hold the door shut against the agents as an observer asks to see a warrant. After agents force the door open, they threaten the man with a taser:

On August 3, Lagunas and the Black agent wearing a Chicago flag patch were recorded again threatening observers on Chicago’s West Side. This time, Lagunas pulls out his taser. The Black agent pulls out his gun.

“Stop following us. Trust me. You’re not gonna like the outcome,” Lagunas tells observers.

Mirroring their stop of Molina in Virginia, the feds accuse the Chicago observers of blocking the road—while video shows agents had blocked them in.

Minneapolis: “You’re not gonna like the outcome of this”

On the day ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good, Lagunas posted to his public but now-inactive personal Facebook page a story about her death with the comment “FAFO.”

The acronym is short for “fuck around and find out:”

Four days later, Lagunas and his team were recorded threatening drivers with more violence in the Twin Cities area.

On January 11, a video shared to Reddit shows the Chicago ICE team block a driver in Minneapolis and threaten him with arrest. While Lagunas shouts at the driver, the other fed with the Chicago flag patch has his gun drawn. It is pointed at the ground.

“You’re not gonna like the outcome of this, sir. I guarantee you’re not going to like the outcome,” Lagunas tells the driver. “Go home to your children. It’s Sunday. You did not learn from what just happened? Go home to your kids.” 

“Learned what?” the man filming asks. 

Lagunas then walks back to his car without responding.

Boxed in by ICE
byu/completephilure inMinneapolis

Another video recorded the same day shows Lagunas and the balding agent smash the windows of a red car and forcibly remove its occupants: local ICE observers Patty O’Keefe and Brandon Sigüenza.

The pair told MPR News the agents sprayed chemical irritants into the car’s vents before breaking its windows and detaining them:

One witness to the pair’s arrest shouts, “Get out of our state! Get the fuck out!” as Lagunas waves a can of pepper-spray at him and others.

He once again warns observers that if they approach, “[they’re] not gonna like the outcome.”

Claims of “weaponized” vehicles

Lagunas’ claim that Molina tried to “run [agents] over” is not new behavior for federal immigration authorities. 

DHS, which oversees ICE and CBP, has a history of justifying its agents’ uses of deadly force by claiming individuals attempted to use vehicles against them or presented a threat to public safety. Footage and reporting from the scenes of these “weaponized” vehicle incidents has repeatedly undermined claims from the agency. 

When an ICE officer shot and killed Silverio Villegas González during a vehicle stop last September in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park, DHS claimed the officer was dragged and “seriously injured” during the incident. Body-worn camera footage from local police, however, showed the ICE agents who stopped and shot González deemed their injuries “nothing major.”

Following the killing of Renée Good, DHS also claimed Good “attempt[ed] to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” Frame-by-frame analysis of the fatal shooting, however, showed Ross standing at the front of Good’s vehicle, and Good instead turning her car away from agents as Ross shot her.

When U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) agent Charles Exum shot Chicagoan Marimar Martinez multiple times last October, she survived, only for DHS to deem her and another Chicago man “domestic terrorists” and the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Chicago to charge them with felony assault for allegedly “ramming” their vehicles. 

The DOJ dismissed the case in November amid a slew of evidentiary issues, and after it came to light that Exum bragged about shooting Martinez in text messages. Other evidence from Martinez’s case that was unsealed in February suggested Exum swerved his vehicle toward Martinez, rather than the other way around. Video footage shows Exum holding a handgun while still inside the USBP vehicle before exiting and shooting at Martinez.

When Molina spoke to the press in Virginia about her encounter with federal agents earlier this week, she affirmed fearing for her own life when Lagunas aimed his gun at her. 

“I think that’s why I took my cell phone out and started recording, because I’m like, ‘yo, this guy is really pointing a gun at my head.’ Like that’s insane,” she said. 

A DHS spokesperson refused to confirm to Unraveled the nature of the Chicago ICE team’s assignment to Virginia or the location of their officers, citing “operational security reasons.”

“The operation was targeting criminal illegal aliens, whose crimes included a hit and run and drug trafficking, and illegal aliens with final orders of removal,” their statement added. “Fearing for their safety, ICE officers conducted a vehicle stop of the driver. Necessary background information of the driver was taken and she could face criminal prosecution as a result of her actions.”

Zoë Takaki and Dominic Guanzon contributed to this reporting.