At about 7 a.m. on Sunday, September 20, 2026, ICE agents tried to stop a car near Hall Street and Century Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The driver drove off. About a mile away, at Century Avenue SW and McKendrick Street SW, the car hit a tree and caught fire. He was alone and died at the scene. Relatives identified him to WOOD TV as Mario David Coronado Juarez, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who had lived and worked in the city for about seven years; MLive reports the surname as Suarez. Organizers say he was 35, a father of three, and worked in construction.
What has not been established is whether anyone chased him. Every official account says agents attempted a stop and the driver fled; the police chief said he fled at excessive speeds and crashed about a mile on. No source says agents pursued him, and this entry does not.
The part that is documented, and the reason this is a federal-accountability story rather than a traffic-fatality story, is what happened afterward. Grand Rapids police put out a release the day of the crash and did not disclose the ICE involvement until Tuesday. When they did, the department added that its “traffic unit investigators are limited in their ability to gather information from federal agents about events preceding the crash,” and that the department “had no involvement in, and no knowledge of, this situation prior to being called to the crash site.” Chief Joe Trigg asked the Michigan State Police to come in, saying they “may be in a better position to determine the timeframe and any other potentially relevant circumstances.” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer then directed the state police to conduct an independent review of the law-enforcement actions surrounding the crash.
Rep. Hillary Scholten wrote to acting ICE Director David Venturella: “No traffic stop should end with a fatality. Something went wrong, and we need to know what and how.” ICE and DHS have said nothing publicly about the death, and did not respond to requests for comment from the Detroit News, Fox 17 or Michigan Public.
A neighbor told WOOD TV's Target 8 that the sound was “like a sonic boom,” that he looked out and saw the car smoking, and that “at first we thought it was an undercover chase, but it was not. It was immigration.” He counted seven to nine unmarked vehicles, an estimate no one has confirmed, and said they arrived before police and fire. City Commissioner Marshall Kilgore said, “I certainly do not understand what this federal agency is doing, but it certainly, in my opinion, is not making our community safer.”
No findings have been issued by anyone. This was the same Sunday as An ICE Agent Shot a Food Delivery Driver in Austin. The Agency Investigating Is a Branch of ICE, and Prosecutors Have Charged the Man Who Was Shot. and ICE Agents Pinned an Evanston Man to the Street Until His Jaw Swelled, Then Drove Off When They Realized He Was a U.S. Citizen, and in all three a local agency said publicly that it could not get information out of federal agents.