Shot by Border Patrol, Then Called a “Domestic Terrorist”
Like other young women she knew who lived on the South Side of Chicago, Marimar Martinez carried a handgun at the bottom of her purse. The gun, a Smith & Wesson pistol for which she had a concealed-carry license, was usually strapped into a neon-pink harness. “It’s a girl gun,” she told me recently. Martinez is thirty-one and works as a teaching assistant at a Montessori school. She thought of herself as a trusting person who’d help “literally anybody,” even strangers. But in 2020, after her sister was the victim of an attempted carjacking, she decided that a gun would be a good idea. The man at the gun shop looked at Martinez, a small woman with round eyes and rosy cheeks, and recommended the pistol, which fit nicely in her hands. She liked to take the gun with her on runs in the forest preserve, where the trails could be lonely. She had never fired the gun outside of a shooting range. But she liked knowing that it was there at the bottom of her bag, for her protection.
That’s where the gun was on Saturday, October 4, 2025. Martinez woke up to a warm, sunlit morning. She filled a wading pool in the yard for her two dogs, Pancho and Gordo, then sorted through old clothes and shoes to donate to a nearby church. She loaded them in the back of her Nissan Rogue and put her purse on the seat beside her. She was almost at the church when she noticed a silver Chevy Tahoe in the road ahead of her. “I was just, like, Something’s not right,” she said. “I know it’s them.”
President Donald Trump had recently begun deploying immigration officers to cities across the country. Four weeks earlier, agents had arrived in Chicago with military fatigues, face masks, armored vehicles, and rifles. Helicopters and drones whirred overhead. The Department of Homeland Security declared this Operation Midway Blitz. It was among the first of several campaigns targeting, the government said, criminals living in the country illegally—though, according to available data, most of the people arrested had no criminal history. Soon, protesters began following agents, recording them, and, at points, attempted to block the entrance of an ICE facility. Agents responded with force, using tear gas and rubber bullets.
Martinez, a U.S. citizen who came from a family of Mexican immigrants, had not attended the protests in Chicago. But she had been following ICE’s activity in the city, mostly through dedicated Facebook pages. She knew that agents took measures to disguise their vehicles. So when she saw the Tahoe, which had tinted back windows, a Kentucky license plate, and a light-up Uber decal on the front windshield, she decided to follow it. “La migra! La migra!” she shouted out her window, using slang for ICE. She honked her horn repeatedly. At one point, she began to record a Facebook live stream in which you can hear her yelling, her manicured almond nails wrapped around the steering wheel.
Charles Exum, a Border Patrol agent of more than twenty years, was driving the Tahoe, with two agents in the back seat. He could hear Martinez shouting, and, when he looked in his mirror, saw a pink phone raised at his vehicle. Exum had a tan overshirt on and, he said later in federal court, in an effort to blend in he had taken off his tactical vest and its attached body camera. A pack of Marlboro Lights rested on the center console. Exum later told the F.B.I. that Martinez had been following him for ten to fifteen minutes, and was “inches from my bumper.” Another civilian vehicle, a black GMC Envoy, was nearby. By the time one of the agents in the back of the Tahoe turned on his body camera, at 10:26 A.M., they appeared to be bracing for confrontation. One was trying to call 911, though no one seemed to answer. Both agents in the back seat held guns in their hands. One already had his finger on the trigger. Multiple cars were honking as the Tahoe headed north on Kedzie Avenue. “Do something, bitch,” an agent said. Another said, “It’s time to get aggressive and get the fuck out, ’cuz they’re trying to box us in.”
“Watch out.”
“If she hits us . . .”
Body-camera footage from an agent in the back seat of the Tahoe. Source U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of Illinois
Martinez has said she was not trying to hit anyone. She wanted to follow the agents, alerting people to their presence, until they eventually left the neighborhood. But, inside the Tahoe, the agents felt the situation was escalating. “We’re gonna make contact, and we’re boxed in,” one said. Video footage from a nearby security camera shows open road in front of the Tahoe, though agents later said that they felt hemmed in by the Rogue and by the black GMC. A moment later, the sides of the Rogue and the Tahoe collided. The body-camera footage shows Exum yanking the wheel left, toward the Rogue, then right. Responsibility for the collision is contested. Exum says Martinez hit him first, before he turned into the Rogue. Martinez says he hit her, and that the body-camera footage proves it. But there is no video showing exactly what took place. Seconds later, Exum stopped his car ahead of Martinez. He opened the driver’s side door with his left hand, a pistol in his right.
The view from a nearby security camera. Source Cheronis & Parente LLC
Martinez saw him raise his gun. Afraid for her life, she said, she hunched her head between her shoulders, her hands on the wheel, and tried to drive away to safety. Exum shouted, “Get down!” He later said that he wasn’t sure why he said this, but that he believed that Martinez was trying to hit him with her car. At 10:29 A.M., he fired at Martinez five times.
She was hit once in her right arm, once in the chest, and three times in the legs. At first, she thought she’d been hit with pepper balls or rubber bullets. Then she saw how much blood there was. She kept driving, holding the wheel with her injured arm and applying pressure to her wounds with the other hand. At 10:30 A.M., she called 911. “Please!” she said, groaning. She turned into a truck stop, parked, and tried to walk inside, holding her phone. She thought of the Western movies she had seen with her father, where characters tied off their wounds to stop the bleeding. “Do you have a bandanna?” she asked the men working inside.
“Hello, ma’am?” the 911 dispatcher asked on the phone. “Do you know who shot you?”
“Oh, my God, I feel like I’m going to faint,” she said.
The dispatcher asked about the shooter six more times. Eventually, Martinez yelled into the phone, “ICE agent shot me!” She sat down in the store, putting her head against the wall and whimpering into the phone. She watched the light outside get brighter. Eventually, she passed out.
When federal law-enforcement officers arrived to search the Rogue, which was covered in blood, they found the gun in its pink holster in her purse. It didn’t matter that she had never touched it. The gun soon became part of a surreal composite image of Martinez presented by the Trump Administration as fact. Within hours, D.H.S. described her as armed and dangerous, a “domestic terrorist.” Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokesperson, wrote on social media that Martinez had “rammed” agents with her car while “armed with a semi-automatic weapon.” The statement about the gun was technically true—most modern pistols are—but misleading. McLaughlin also said that Martinez had recently written a post on social media saying, “Hey to all my gang let’s fuck those mother fuckers up, don’t let them take anyone.” But Martinez had never posted this; the quote, it turned out, came from another person’s Facebook account. Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., shared a video of a black S.U.V. aggressively ramming an agent’s truck, attributing the act to Martinez. But the S.U.V. wasn’t her car, and the video was from an unrelated incident. These posts remain online.
Martinez was charged with assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law-enforcement officer. She faced twenty years in prison. By the time she woke up at a hospital, hours later, the government’s version of the story had already spread. She saw federal officers in her room, and feared that one of them was the man who had just shot her. She asked a nurse if she could keep them away, but the nurse said that there was nothing she could do. “Sorry,” Martinez remembered her saying. “You should have never rammed them.”
One reason we know so much about this case is that Martinez recently lobbied a judge to unseal the evidence. She had watched, in the months following her own shooting, as federal agents shot three people in Minneapolis, all of whom were then blamed for inciting the violence. Two of the victims were dead. “I was there in their shoes, and I have a voice,” Martinez said. “Something that they don’t have.” The evidence includes body-camera footage, F.B.I. reports, interview summaries, and dozens of text messages. Together, the material gives us the most complete picture yet of a D.H.S. shooting and its aftermath. Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Parente, believes that her case should be studied as a “playbook” for D.H.S. violence. “She’s one of the few people who has survived the bullets and can speak out,” he told me.
Last year, the Trump Administration began pushing ICE to start making three thousand arrests a day. In service of that goal, agents have spent the last nine months roving unfamiliar cities—New Orleans, Charlotte, Minneapolis—wearing face masks and conducting raids. Fear alone has been enough to make these operations dangerous. Last August, in Los Angeles County, when agents appeared near a Home Depot in Monrovia, a day laborer fled on foot into the freeway and was struck and killed by a car. The raids have also produced a string of outrages: a six-month-old baby exposed to tear gas; a pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball; a man dragged outside in sub-freezing temperatures, wearing only his underwear, after being mistaken for a sex offender. With every new shock, the animus between protesters and agents has grown worse. Last summer, Kristi Noem, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that D.H.S. considers “violence” against agents to be anything that threatens their safety, including “videotaping them.”
Through interactions caught on video, the anger has trickled into public view. A masked agent, in one video, screams at a man in Minneapolis, “Stop fucking following us!” In another, a woman tells an agent, “I hope you have a terrible day.” There is a sense, watching some of the videos, that the agents feel hunted. In its press releases, D.H.S. repeatedly claims that assaults against agents have increased by more than a thousand per cent. (An NPR analysis of court records last fall found the increase of alleged assaults may be closer to twenty-five per cent.) The agency did not provide a full account of the incidents it has been tracking, but it did send a list of several examples, including photos of an officer’s finger that had been “bit off,” an officer with an open wound on the back of his head, and another missing a chunk of his upper lip. Protesters have thrown rocks, set off fireworks, and followed agents to their hotels. In response, D.H.S. leaders have reinforced agents’ sense of tribalism. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol leader who became the face of Trump’s immigration-enforcement operations until he was sidelined earlier this year, was captured on video giving a pep talk to a huddle of agents in Los Angeles. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top,” Bovino had told the agents. “It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.”
“Whose city is it, chief?” an agent asked.
Bovino replied, “This is our fucking city.”
D.H.S. has raced to hire new, inexperienced agents, holding ICE career fairs and putting up Customs and Border Protection tables at rodeos and sporting expos. But even for longtime Border Patrol agents, who are trained at an academy in the deserts of New Mexico and stationed along the northern and southern borders, high-density cities are unfamiliar terrain. “They don't have experience working in an urban environment,” John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama Administration, told me. “You don’t have protesters out there watching you.” To send those agents into politically fraught urban environments—“well, it’s very dangerous,” he said.
Over the past year, there have been at least seventeen D.H.S. shootings, four of them fatal. After many of them, Trump officials moved quickly to justify the shooting and accuse the victim of attacking agents, all before an investigation had taken place. In ten of the thirteen shootings where the victims survived, they faced felony charges. In five of those cases, the charges were either dropped or dismissed. Just a few days into Operation Midway Blitz, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican man with only traffic violations on his record. Afterward, D.H.S. said that González had driven his car at agents, hitting and dragging one of the officers “a significant distance” and leaving him “seriously injured.” Video from the scene later showed two agents on either side of González’s car as he began to reverse his vehicle. Neither agent appears to have been hit, though, in body camera footage, one says he was dragged “a little bit” and describes his injuries as “nothing major.” D.H.S. has not publicly amended its account of the shooting.
In January, in Minneapolis, Renee Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother, was driving home from a school drop-off with her partner when she saw federal agents, and stopped in the street. An agent shot and killed her as she tried to drive away. Two hours later, D.H.S. issued a statement accusing her of trying to run the agent over, in an “act of domestic terrorism.” That afternoon, Trump also posted online that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Video later showed Good turning her wheel away from the agent who shot her. Two weeks later, Trump said that he had learned that Good’s father was a “tremendous Trump fan,” and noted that agents were going to “make mistakes.” But he left his earlier statements online.
Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, a nurse, was on the south side of Minneapolis filming agents with his cellphone. A handgun, for which he had a permit, was holstered at his hip. Video showed that agents pushed him to his knees, disarmed him, and then shot him. But a few hours later, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who had tried to “assassinate” an officer. Pretti’s parents learned of their son’s death when an Associated Press reporter called them. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man,” they wrote in a statement. This appeal produced testimonials, pictures of Pretti with his mountain bike, and a video of Pretti eulogizing a veteran over his hospital bed. But it was hard to imagine any of that having as much reach as the label “domestic terrorist.”
Before October 4th, Marimar Martinez lived a quiet life in Chicago. Her parents had come to the United States from Durango, Mexico, in the early nineties. The journey took fifteen days. They made most of it on foot, walking day and night with little rest. They thought, at points, that they might not survive. In Chicago, Martinez’s father picked up minimum-wage jobs. Her parents, who eventually became citizens, struggled at first to pay for formula and diapers. But they lived in a two-story home with aunts, uncles, and cousins, who helped them get by. For a time, Martinez worked at a salon, but she found her job at the Montessori school more fulfilling. By her thirties, she was in a mode of “self-care.” This meant two-hour sessions at the gym, long runs, and horseback riding on the weekends. “I was just doing me,” she said.
What she saw of D.H.S. activity in Chicago disturbed her. She had two friends who were taken, and she knew people who were scared to leave their homes. She was helping some of those people when she could, by buying groceries or monitoring “ICE watch” Facebook pages. Five days before Martinez was shot, a C.B.P. intelligence team shared her name, picture, and social-media account with agents in Chicago, saying that the information had been verified with D.H.S. databases. (In a statement, an unnamed D.H.S. spokesperson wrote, “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS,” but that the agency does monitor and investigate threats.) Martinez appeared to have been flagged because of a post she had recirculated from one of the Facebook groups she followed, which claimed that a YouTuber was working as an agent in Operation Midway Blitz. Martinez shared the post and commented, “They found him lol.” The intelligence report said that Martinez was “encouraging the doxxing” of the agent.
Not much is publicly known about Exum. In body-camera footage, his face is blurred, and he speaks in a thick, clipped drawl. (He did not respond to a request for comment for this piece; D.H.S. also declined a request for an interview.) He had spent almost twenty years at a Border Patrol station in Maine, where agents were responsible for monitoring more than two hundred miles of the northern border and coastline. In remote areas, this could require snowshoes, snowmobiles, and A.T.V.s. Exum was a supervisor there: he made schedules for subordinate agents, dealt with disciplinary issues, approved time sheets, and once spoke to a Maine newspaper about “the common goal of making people safer.” Chicago was not his usual environment for doing this. Exum had driven the Tahoe, his government-issued vehicle, to the city thirty days earlier and was just a few days shy of going home. That day, his Tahoe had been disguised with both an Uber decal and an out-of-state license plate. (If a car was captured on video, it was common to swap the plates.) “There had been a lot of targeting of agents,” he said later, in federal court.
A few minutes after the shooting, more agents arrived on the scene. A siren blared and cars were honking. “Nobody fucking wants you here!” a woman screamed. “They’re shooting at people!” The agents seemed unbothered. Exum turned on his body camera, armed himself with an M-4 rifle, and stood quietly on the grass. In the footage, we see what Exum sees: clusters of agents talking among themselves, a cloudless sky. One agent asked if the woman had been shooting at him. “No, I was shooting,” Exum said. “She came forward. And that’s when I opened up on her.”
At points, Exum appeared to examine the damage to the side of the Tahoe. “Go ahead and sit down in the back,” an agent told him, eight minutes after the shooting. “Just lean on the back.” But Exum refused. “Oh, I’m good. I’m good, bro,” he said. He pointed to the side of the car. “This sucks, but . . .” Later, he testified about his fondness for the car. On Kedzie Avenue, he told the agent, “Finally get a good ride.” Ten minutes later, he opened and shut the front door and tested out the window controls. To himself, he said, “Finally got a good Tahoe.”
Later, in court, Exum testified that he “did what I had to do to save my life.” In body-camera footage from the moments leading up to the shooting, the agents seemed to believe they were in real danger. Afterward, a strange calm settled over the scene. “I don’t know if I hit her or not,” he said, sounding a bit dazed. “I got, fuck, five to seven rounds off at her?” At another point, one agent asked another, with startling casualness, “Good hits? Any hits?” Exum had just lit a cigarette and was telling another colleague about the shooting when an agent walked over and told him to stop. “Just no statements. You keep your mouth shut,” another agent told him soon after. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t let other people come to you.”
Meanwhile, news of the shooting was rippling through the neighborhood. “Fuck you, motherfucker!” a man shouted as he drove by in his car. Later that day, a protest gathered at the site of the shooting. A smaller one formed near the truck stop where Martinez had collapsed. By then, six armed agents were milling about the parking lot. When Martinez had first come through the doors, the workers inside had rushed to help. “Sientate, sientate, sientate,” they can be heard saying on the 911 call. Sit, sit, sit. The paramedics had removed one of the bullets from Martinez’s arm, leaving it behind, along with bloody rags. An F.B.I. report later noted how careful the store manager had been not to touch the bullet, arranging pieces of tape and chairs around it to create a barrier. Still, just before 1 P.M., the shop received its first threatening phone call. The caller was angry that the workers had let ICE agents into their parking lot. “You’re going to have a bad day,” the caller said.
About an hour later, Exum wrote to a Signal group of fellow-agents called “Posse Chat,” which he described as a kind of “support group”: “Oh my lord man, it’s been a hell of a day. Watch the news and yes that was me.” As the day went on, his messages became more relaxed, even proud. “I have a great new scenario to add to our training,” he wrote. An agent responded with a “surprise” emoji. That evening, he sent a photo he’d taken of an exchange between two other agents about where his bullets had landed on Martinez. “Damn!!! FAFO,” one of the agents wrote back, using an acronym for “Fuck around and find out,” which has become popular inside the Trump Administration. “I leave for a few weeks and it turns into Iraq.” The agent added a crying-laughing emoji. Exum wrote to Posse Chat, “This came from one of the big dogs phones.” He also sent the exchange to his brother, because, as he later explained to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, they were competitive with one another about shooting accuracy. “They call this Chiraq now,” he said. His brother replied, “Damnit man. Good shootin.” Exum wrote back, “lol, gracias,” and then, minutes later, “Sweet. My 15 mins of fame. Lmao.”
No one in D.H.S. seems to have been worried about Exum’s actions. A few hours after the shooting, Bovino sent him an e-mail congratulating him. “I’d like to extend an offer for you to extend your retirement beyond age 57,” he wrote. “In light of your excellent service in Chicago, you have much yet left to do!!” Exum sent it to his wife, along with another congratulatory message he had received: “You are a legend among agents you better fuckin know that. Beers on me when I see you at training.” Within a few days, Exum was sending links around about the shooting. “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” he wrote to Posse Chat, referring to five bullet holes and two exit wounds in Martinez’s body. “Are they supportive?” one agent asked. “Big time. Everyone has been including Chief Bovino, Chief Banks, Sec Noem and El Jefe himself . . . according to Bovino,” he said, referring to top Administration officials. (I asked D.H.S. whether “El Jefe” referred to Trump, but the agency did not respond.)
The hospital was the first time Martinez heard that she had allegedly “rammed” the officers’ car. “I was, like, ‘ram?’ What do you mean ram?” she said. “I got hit.” It felt as if the events as she understood them were being overwritten by another set of events entirely. Martinez’s chest, arms, and legs were wrapped in bandages. She was read her Miranda rights. After a few hours, she was taken to an F.B.I. field office. She was handed her cellphone so she could write down her parents’ phone numbers; she was still in shock and surprised to find she couldn’t remember them. The phone was covered in dried blood.
The next day, she was put in a jail cell. She met a woman there who had been arrested for allegedly assaulting a federal officer. The woman told Martinez that she’d gone to a protest because “some girl got shot.” Martinez realized that she was that girl. As she was being released, she saw a story about herself on the local news. They played the video of the black S.U.V. that wasn’t hers. They used the words “domestic terrorist.” The phrase made her think of “somebody who builds bombs,” she told me, or “Osama bin Laden’s daughter.”
As the weeks passed, Martinez began physical therapy and went back to work. At the Montessori school, she switched from infants to preschoolers, who were easier to handle with her injuries. Her hands had lasting damage—cramps and pains that got worse as the temperature outside got colder. She deactivated her Facebook, because, after it was mentioned in a D.H.S. press release, it had filled with hateful comments. “Hi, bitch, you should die,” one read.
At home, her mother seemed anxious and depressed. She had fainting spells. When her daughter tried to leave the house, she would call her back inside. She began to report aches in her body in the same places where Martinez had been shot. “I think I’m getting your pain instead,” she said. At night, Martinez lay awake picturing an agent in the middle of the road raising his gun. At points, the government’s narrative about her became even more extreme. In a filing to the Supreme Court, on October 17th, Trump’s Solicitor General described the collision as a “carefully orchestrated ambush” involving ten civilian vehicles. At times, Martinez’s sense of disorientation became so intense that she would check the bullet wounds on her body to make sure they were real.
Her case seemed strong. Martinez hadn’t been part of a “convoy of civilian vehicles,” as the initial complaint claimed. The cause of the collision was disputed. There was no evidence that Martinez had tried to hit Exum with her car. Two of Exum’s bullets had pierced the side of her car, suggesting, her lawyers said, that he continued to fire his gun after the Nissan Rogue was already past him. A few days after the shooting, Exum had driven the Tahoe back to Maine, where the scuff marks on the car—the best evidence of the crash—were buffed out by a C.B.P. mechanic. (Exum later said that he hadn’t requested this.) In November, Exum returned to Chicago for an evidentiary hearing. In the courtroom, Martinez heard him speak coolly about his skill with a gun. “I’m a firearms instructor,” Exum said. “I take pride in my shooting skills.” He said that he hadn’t known that Martinez was a citizen. “I do now,” he said.
Then, days later, the government asked to drop the case. The judge dismissed the charges with prejudice, meaning that the case cannot be retried. It was an abrupt reversal. “Put that in your books, Exum,” Martinez said in front of television cameras in the courthouse lobby. Still, that day, D.H.S. released another statement calling Martinez a domestic terrorist. The next night, she went to dinner with the woman she had met in jail. Martinez had remembered her being “so bubbly, so full of energy.” Now the woman seemed changed. She told Martinez that, although the charges against her had been dropped, she was struggling. At times, she was on high alert that she would encounter federal agents again. Martinez went home that night but was unable to sleep.
This is one of several impacts of a D.H.S. shooting: injuries, P.T.S.D., grief over the loss of a family member. But there is another that is more difficult to track. These cases have left people trying to recover their reputations and, with them, a sense of reality. Once the truth has been distorted, it is not so easy to repair. Luke Ganger, Renee Good’s brother, recently said that the most important thing he can do, now that his sister is gone, is help the country understand “who Nae is.” Daniel Rascon, a twenty-three-year-old man in California, was in a car with his fiancée’s father and brother when agents surrounded their vehicle. As the family tried to drive away, an agent fired at their car. Later, agents came to Rascon’s home and detained his fiancée’s father. The government charged Rascon with assaulting a federal officer, alleging that he had driven at agents. The charges have since been dropped. But Rascon has asked how the family is supposed to “operate normally in the world.” In Minneapolis, a Venezuelan man, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, was shot in the leg. D.H.S. quickly accused him of attacking agents. Four weeks later, the charges against him were dropped. Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said that two agents made “false statements” about the shooting. The agents have been placed on leave. But D.H.S. has not provided an updated account of what happened.
In cases that are still pending, there is even less that defendants can do to combat a D.H.S. narrative. On October 30th, Carlos Jimenez, a twenty-five-year-old who lives outside of Los Angeles, approached a group of D.H.S agents to warn them that a group of schoolchildren would soon be arriving at a nearby bus stop. According to his lawyer, Jimenez was trying to encourage the agents to wrap up before the kids arrived. After being told to leave, Jimenez tried to do a three-point turn. D.H.S. said that he attempted to “run officers over by reversing directly at them without stopping.” An agent fired through Jimenez’s back passenger-side window, hitting him in the back shoulder. D.H.S. said that the officer fired defensively, “fearing for his life.” Jimenez has not spoken publicly about the shooting. He has been advised to wait until his trial. Even if he wins his case, or if the charges are dropped before a trial begins, his lawyer, Greg Jackson, told me, “I don’t anticipate this Administration ever apologizing or retracting their statements. The truth does not matter.”
In January, Aliya Rahman, a forty-three-year-old Bangladeshi American, was dragged from her car by agents in Minneapolis while she yelled, “I’m disabled!” Later, as video of the incident spread online, D.H.S. called Rahman an “agitator” who had ignored an officer’s commands and was arrested for obstruction. Rahman says that she had been driving to a doctor’s appointment when she found herself in the middle of a chaotic ICE enforcement operation. “I was not trying to be there at all,” she told me. Rahman is a security software engineer and likes to study disinformation patterns. She has learned that even when multiple “corrections” are made to an account, it isn’t necessarily enough to change people’s beliefs about what happened. She told me that being the subject of one of these viral clashes is like “being in a time capsule that just exploded.” A single encounter will follow her online for the rest of her life. “People can look at those same facts and be, like, ‘This person is a nightmare criminal liar’ or ‘This person stood up for something.’ ”
Recently, I met Martinez at a federal courthouse in Chicago’s Loop. She stood in the quiet, carpeted room in a black pants suit and a gold-chain necklace. She was there to ask a judge to unseal the evidence in the case, in the hopes of proving that she was not the person the government said she was. Sometimes Martinez spoke proudly of her actions. She had been trying to defend her community. She had fought her case and then fought to make the evidence public. When she looked at it this way, she said, she felt like Wonder Woman. But there were other days when she felt less sure. On those days, she has been holding “little meetings in my head,” she said. She tells herself that she was not an armed aggressor who had set out to ambush agents on Kedzie Avenue. She was not the driver of the black S.U.V. in the video. She had never posted, “Let’s fuck those mother fuckers up.”
In the courtroom, the judge ruled that almost all of the evidence in the case should be unsealed, to help Martinez clear her name. “Here is what I struggle with,” the judge said. “I don’t understand why the United States government, after being given many, many opportunities to do so, has expressed zero concern about the sullying of Ms. Martinez’s reputation.” After the hearing, Martinez was quiet. A photographer followed her outside as she walked the frozen sidewalks back to her lawyer’s office. Upstairs, she collapsed into a chair. Parente couldn’t believe the judge had ruled so overwhelmingly in his client’s favor. “A federal judge saying all those great things about you?” Very rare, he said. Martinez nodded. It was a cold day, the kind that made her hand hurt. She seemed exhausted. Soon, they planned to file a civil lawsuit against the government, which would likely last for months. Martinez shrugged. “What can I do?” she said. “I’m still here. I’m still living.” ♦