In October, a Border Patrol agent shot a U.S. citizen accused of hitting his vehicle while trailing an immigration operation in Chicago. The Border Patrol agent then took to a work group chat to react to the news that he was being deployed to another city.
“Cool. I’m up for another round of ‘fuck around and find out,'” he said.
For the woman injured of that non-fatal shooting in October and her attorney, the shooting of another U.S. citizen in Minneapolis on Wednesday came as a bracing reminder of her experience. Once again, a motorist had been shot by a federal agent.
“Minneapolis is the next ’round,'” said lawyer Christopher Parente, who represents Marimar Martinez, the woman shot in Chicago.
Parente said Wednesday he had watched video of the shooting in Minneapolis and spoken with his client about the eerie similarities to her shooting in Chicago, which left Martinez with seven wounds.
“We both said, ‘Of course this happened,'” Parente told The Intercept. “It is no surprise to either Marimar or myself that this happened, and unfortunately, it is going to continue to happen.”
The shooting in Minneapolis is the latest of a series involving agents from either U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection deployed in American cities on the orders of President Donald Trump.
In September, an ICE officer shot and killed an immigrant, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, who was accused of hitting and dragging the officer. The following month in Los Angeles, a federal agent shot a TikTok creator who was accused of hitting law enforcement vehicles that had boxed him in — although video obtained by the Los Angeles Times suggested that his car was not moving. A judge dismissed charges against the TikToker days ago.
Across the country, police often justify shootings by claiming that motorists have used their vehicles as a deadly weapon, even though police chiefs themselves acknowledge that such shootings are dangerous and ineffective.
Part of the reason that the shootings keep happening is that immigration officials appear to have taken no steps to rein in agents who shoot civilians, Parente said. In the Chicago case, Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum testified in a November 5 court hearing that he had faced no discipline.
Federal prosecutors initially charged Martinez with assaulting federal agents during the October 4 immigration raids undertaken as part of Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s name for its Chicago crackdown.
Exum’s text messages appear to have been so potentially damaging for the government’s case, however, that prosecutors dismissed the charges against Martinez shortly after the messages were made public.
In one, Exum bragged about the number of times he had hit Martinez.
“I fired 5 shots and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” he said.
Prosecutors dismissed the charges against Martinez despite claims from top-ranking government officials that Martinez was a “domestic terrorist” — the same label that the Department of Homeland Security is using against the Renee Nicole Good, 37-year-old woman identified by her mother as the person shot and killed in Minneapolis.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good was trying to attack federal agents.
“It was an act of domestic terrorism,” Noem said. “These vehicle rammings are domestic acts of terrorism. We are working with the Department of Justice to prosecute them as such.”
Parente said that similar claims that his client had tried to ram a federal agent fell apart on the witness stand, when the agent acknowledged that the collision was more akin to a side swipe.
“They labeled Marimar Martinez a ‘domestic terrorist’ from day one,” Parente said. “I would caution anybody reading any press releases or statements about this from the government right now to be very cautious.”
