This past fall, a U.S. citizen named Marimar Martinez stumbled into a truck stop on the South Side of Chicago after being shot five times by a federal immigration officer. The workers at the truck stop rushed to her aid before she eventually passed out. About a mile away, the agent who shot her was standing on the side of the road with a group of other agents. “I’m good, bro,” he told one of them. Within hours, while Martinez was still being treated for her wounds at a hospital, the Department of Homeland Security blamed her for the shooting and labelled her a “domestic terrorist.”
I first met Martinez in Chicago in early February. She was fighting to unseal the evidence that had been collected in her case. She told me that she wanted the public to see how D.H.S. had distorted what had happened to her. I have spent the past month talking with Martinez, other people affected by D.H.S. violence, and legal experts. I also reviewed all the evidence that has been released in Martinez’s case: body-camera footage, internal F.B.I. reports, hundreds of pages of court documents, and text messages sent to and from the agent who shot Martinez.
I came to see the story as a kind of anatomy of a D.H.S. shooting. There have been at least seventeen shootings by federal immigration officers in the past year. Four of them have been fatal. Americans came to know the details of Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s deaths in Minneapolis. In those cases, and in others, D.H.S. has accused the victim of having attacked agents, even when evidence emerges contradicting its account. “The truth does not matter,” a lawyer in another shooting case said.
Martinez, who is thirty-one, first heard herself described as a domestic terrorist when she was being released from jail. The phrase made her think of someone “who builds bombs” or “Osama bin Laden’s daughter.” “Literally the opposite of me,” she told me. While recovering from her injuries, she was also fighting to restore her reputation and, with it, a sense of reality.
Few cases have revealed as much as Martinez’s about the mind-set of the agents enforcing Trump’s immigration crackdown in Chicago and elsewhere. The Border Patrol agent who shot Martinez, Charles Exum, had been lifted from his regular duties along a partially remote stretch of border in Maine and placed in an unfamiliar urban environment.
After the shooting, he received positive feedback from the then Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino. As the days went by, Exum’s messages to other agents became more relaxed, even proud. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes,” he wrote to a group chat of agents, referring to the entry and exit wounds in Martinez’s body. “Put that in your book boys.”
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P.S. The President has reportedly been buying his favorite shoes for his male staffers and White House visitors, even guessing their sizes. (Perhaps inexpertly.) The power center of the Trump Administration has always been at the boss’s feet.
