A trove of evidence was released Tuesday in the controversial shooting of Marimar Martínez by an immigration agent at the height of Operation Midway Blitz, including body-worn camera footage showing the tense moments just before their vehicles collided and an email sent later that day by Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino praising the agent’s conduct.
“It’s time to get aggressive and get the (expletive) out,” one agent says on a bodycam video as horns blare on Kedzie Avenue in Brighton Park, where Martínez had been following the agents through the neighborhood on the morning of Oct. 4, according to the material released by the U.S. attorney’s office.
Seconds later, the driver, Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum, appears to jerk the steering wheel to the left, in the direction of Martínez’s vehicle alongside them. The video jolts, apparently capturing the collision between the agents’ Chevrolet Tahoe and Martínez’s car.
“Be advised we have been struck!” one of the agents in the vehicle yells to a dispatcher. Exum then gets out of the vehicle and moves off-camera and five rapid-succession gunshots are heard.
“We have shots fired, shots fired, we need backup,” an agent said into a radio.
“We’re on south Kuh-DEE-zee, near Highway 55,” the agent says, butchering the street name.
Already, bystanders can be heard screaming expletives at the agents.
The materials, obtained by the Tribune through an open records request after a judge agreed to lift a protective order, also included an email to Exum from Bovino, the now-demoted public face of the Trump administration’s ongoing deportation push, praising the agent on the afternoon of the shooting.
“Good afternoon,” read the email, which was sent at 3:11 p.m. on Oct. 4, when Martínez was still hospitalized and had not yet been charged. “I would like to extend an offer to you to extend your retirement beyond age 57…. In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much left to do!!”
Exum, meanwhile, exchanged a series of texts with his wife as well as a group of fellow agents under the name “Posse Chat.” In one of them, someone Exum identified as “the guy from Vermont” wrote, “Good job brother, glad you are unharmed and get to live to tell the story.”
“You are a legend among agents you better (expletive) know that. Beers on me when I see you at training,” the agent texted Exum, the records show.
Another unidentified person texted Exum, “That’s awesome! You did REAL GOOD” with a heart eyes emoji. He responded, “Thanks you mam.”
Exum repeatedly told others in his chats that Martínez had tried to run him over with her vehicle and that he fired through her front windshield. He also noted how time “slowed way down” during the shooting, and that the trajectory of the bullets appeared to have been altered by the windshield.
At one point, he shared a link to a news story headlined, “Federal agents taunted Chicago woman to ‘do something’ before shooting her, attorney claims.” Underneath the link, Exum wrote “LMAO.”
In another message on the “Posse Chat,” someone asked Exum if the bosses had been supportive.
“Big time,” Exum replied. “Everyone has been including Chief Bovino, Chief Banks, Sec Noem and El Jefe himself … according to Bovino.”
Exum appeared to reference Trump in the “El Jefe himself” response, which translates to “the Boss himself.”
Another text showed an unidentified family member telling Exum that Gov. JB Pritzker “is saying bad things about you this morning.”
“Awe, I cry,” Exum replied. “That hurt my feeling.”
The evidence offered a rare, behind-the-scenes look at one of the highest-profile investigations of Operation Midway Blitz, where Trump administration officials, in a playbook that has now become familiar in other cities, almost immediately labeled of Martínez as a “domestic terrorist” after she was shot — a narrative the government has refused to retract even after assault charges against Martínez were dropped.
Days after Bovino led a similar immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis, an eerily similar shooting occurred there when a Border Patrol agent fatally shot Renee Good as she tried to drive away from agents who had ordered her out of her car.
Lawyers for Martínez, meanwhile, announced Tuesday that they plan to file a civil lawsuit over her shooting. A news conference to discuss the litigation and evidence in the investigation is set for Wednesday morning.
In a statement Tuesday night, Martinez’s lead attorney, Christopher Parente, said he found it “ironic that after months of fighting the release of this evidence, the U.S. Attorneys Office releases the discovery at the 11th hour in a misguided attempt to take the sting out of just how damaging it is to the government.”
”We wish they would have invested this time in working with DHS to correct the many lies they told the American public about this case,” Parente said.
In agreeing to lift a protective order last week, U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis said the federal government has shown “zero concern” about ruining the reputation of Martínez, a U.S. citizen and Chicago resident who is presumed innocent under our legal system.
Parente said last week the evidence shows the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to smear his client were “absurd.”
“You can’t call a U.S. citizen with no criminal history, who is a Montessori school teacher, a domestic terrorist, which is such a loaded word in this country,” Parente said.
Later this month, Martínez is scheduled to attend President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to Congress as a guest of U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, a Chicago Democrat.
Prosecutors had alleged Martínez was part of a convoy of civilians who were following agents when she rammed Exum’s vehicle near 39th Street and Kedzie, prompting Exum to jump out of his Tahoe and fire five shots, wounding Martínez seven times.
Martínez’s attorneys argued it was Exum who sideswiped Martínez and that his extreme use of force was completely unjustified. They also alleged evidence tampering, saying Exum was inexplicably allowed to drive the Tahoe more than 1,000 miles back to his home base in Maine, where a Border Patrol mechanic attempted to “wipe off” some of the scuff marks from the crash.
In a bombshell hearing in November, it was revealed that after the shooting, as news of the incident was making national headlines, Exum texted a group of other agents that he was “up for another round of “f— around and find out.”
Exum, a 23-year veteran of Border Patrol, also texted the group a link to a news article about the shooting and said, “Read it … I fired 5 shots and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” according to court records.
In his court testimony Nov. 5, Exum described the circle of fellow agents he chatted with as a sort of support group for “relieving stress.”
“And what did you mean by ‘Read it. 5 shots?’” asked Parente. “Why are you pointing that fact out?”
“I’m a firearms instructor,” Exum answered. “And I take pride in my shooting skills.”
“You take pride in your shooting skills?” Parente clarified.
“That is correct,” Exum said.
After the charges against Martínez were dropped on Nov. 20, it’s since been revealed in court that her car is part of a second, ongoing criminal investigation into the shooting, which is being handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in South Bend, Indiana.
Meanwhile, the videos released Tuesday captured some of the mayhem that was exploding on Chicago’s streets at the height of Midway Blitz, with near-daily confrontations between irate citizens and Bovino’s roaming squads of agents targeting people for potential immigration violations.
A few minutes after Martínez was shot, the agent wearing the body camera explained to another agent on the scene: “(The) vehicle struck us twice, then when we stepped out, she floored it and tried to run him over.”
“We tried to get ahold of CPD through 911,” the same agent says to uniformed city police shortly afterward. “I called twice and no answer.”
Toward the end of the video, a Chicago police squad car pulls up and a white-shirted supervisor gets out, asking if the agents are OK and if they had a supervisor on the scene. He can be seen speaking with federal personnel a few feet down the sidewalk as the agent gives his version of events to a colleague:
“We were fine all the way up until about a block from here,” he said. “And we were like, nothing too crazy, we don’t want to cause an accident. We’re just going to roll to 55 and lose them on the highway.”
The agent said the other motorists seemed to be trying to box them in, “then the girls behind us got brave, tried to box us in from the left, a pickup truck.”
“One up front, tried to get us from the front. And we were like, ‘No, we’ve got to roll,’ so we started moving to try to get out,” the agent said. “They got aggressive on both sides. And then a chick was swerving like she was trying to hit us already until she finally struck us … she tried to run him down.”
The agents said, “It went from zero to 100, very, very quickly.”
In agreeing to lift the protective order, Alexakis, the district judge, said last week that while she’s sympathetic to Exum’s privacy concerns, his own “testimony and demeanor” during a pretrial hearing in November tipped the scales.
“One feeling that comes through in those texts is a feeling of pride,” Alexakis said. “He talked about pride in his shooting skills.”
Alexakis said Exum’s texts are “clearly relevant” and “communicate his impression of the relevant events.”
“They have impeachment value and bear on his credibility,” she said.
Chicago Tribune’s Sam Charles contributed.
