Border Patrol agents choked and dragged Honduran cook from car, knocked him unconscious during St. Paul gas station arrest

On January 11, 2026, U.S. Border Patrol agents smashed the driver's-side window of Orbin Mauricio Henriquez Serrano's car at a Speedway gas station in St. Paul, Minnesota, pulled him from the vehicle, wrapped an arm around his neck, and threw him to the ground, where four agents knelt on his back while handcuffing him. Henriquez Serrano, a Honduran restaurant cook who had lived in the Twin Cities since 2024, lost consciousness during the struggle; agents dragged his limp body to a van without checking for a pulse, and video of his motionless form, recorded by the outlet Status Coup, circulated widely online and prompted fears he had died. Then-Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino, who was leading a tour of enforcement stops for reporters that morning and had been directing agents to target Twin Cities gas stations, watched the arrest and ordered bystanders and journalists to back away.

The arrest came four days after ICE deportation officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good during the same federal deployment, Operation Metro Surge, and Henriquez Serrano told the Minnesota Reformer he begged agents not to kill him "like they did to her." A CNN investigation later reported that federal prosecutors in Minnesota's U.S. Attorney's Office found immigration agents' complaint reports during the surge "downright false" as a general matter. In a call with prosecutors after Good's killing, Bovino said, "We're going to pacify this place, we're going to roll 'em up"; a former federal prosecutor separately described the operation as run "antithetical to principles of law enforcement."

Henriquez Serrano spent the night in a holding cell at ICE's Whipple Building headquarters and was flown the next morning to Camp East Montana, a tent facility in El Paso, Texas, where his requests for medical care went unanswered for days. He was deported before he could meet with an attorney his family had retained through a GoFundMe campaign, and has since retained a Minnesota lawyer to pursue a Federal Tort Claims Act suit over the arrest. DHS did not answer detailed questions about the arrest, saying only that "reasonable suspicion" justified the stop and denying that ICE engages in racial profiling.