Judge May Grant Release of Marimar Martinez Shooting Footage After Feds Drop Case Against Her
The Chicago woman was shot 5 times by a Border Patrol agent in October, in another case reeking of government lies.
Screenshot, CNN Splinter marimar martinez
American citizens didn’t just suddenly start getting shot by federal agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Border Patrol in January—you just started hearing about it a lot more often. In truth, violence against Americans from federal agents has been rampant since the start of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. According to organizations attempting to track all of the cases, there have been at least eight U.S. residents killed in the field by ICE or Border Patrol encounters since this past July, and another nine cases that involved non-fatal shootings. That’s in addition to the at least 32 people who died as detainees in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security in 2025, a number that doesn’t even include some notable cases, like this one about a man detained by ICE who subsequently vanished off the face of the Earth. But now, in the wake of the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, there’s finally enough attention and outrage directed toward the subject that we might see new evidence of federal wrongdoing in some of the other cases. And one of the most notable is that of Chicago’s Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times (but survived) by a Border Patrol agent in October of last year.
This is a case that you may remember, but one that could soon be commanding headlines once again with the release of illuminating footage. Unlike in the cases of Renee Nicole Good or Alex Pretti, there was no firsthand bystander footage immediately available of the shooting of U.S. citizen Marimar Martinez, which led to the incident boiling down in its first days to a he-said, she-said dynamic. The government attempted to paint Martinez as a violent agitator, again using the “domestic terrorist” distinction that they rushed to apply to Good and Pretti without even waiting for the evidence they demanded everyone else wait for before rendering judgement. Martinez was charged with assaulting officers with a deadly weapon, in reference to claims that she had attempted to ram an officer with her vehicle, which she denied. After the government’s narrative increasingly fell apart, however, a federal judge dismissed the charges with prejudice in November. Both Martinez and her attorney, meanwhile, claimed that Border Patrol body cam footage that they had been able to view from the incident proved that the government’s account of the incident was a lie. The only problem is that the public has never had a chance to see that footage, having been withheld by the court from the media. Now, Martinez is fighting for the public release of that footage, arguing through her lawyer that the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti make the release of her own shooting footage a necessity.
This is testimony…
📌 Stella Carlson, “Pink coat lady”, speaks on the murder of Alex Pretti.
“After the shooting, they (ICE) decided to just scatter and save themselves.”
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) Jan 28, 2026 at 5:48 AM
“What happened to Ms. Martinez and the truth about the events of October 4, 2025, as well as what is happening with the killing of two other individuals by DHS agents have become matters of strong public interest and debate,” wrote attorney Chris Parente. Footage should be made public to shed light on how DHS “responds in cases where their agents use deadly force against U.S. citizens.” Parente goes on to argue that because the U.S. government has effectively continued to make a case that Martinez is a “domestic terrorist” by not retracting any of its previous statements against her, the release of the footage is also necessary “to allow Ms. Martinez to ensure that debate is based in fact.”
She may get her wish. After filing their motion to force the release of the body camera footage of the incident, U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis seemed to grow frustrated Thursday with the government’s lawyers attempting to seek repeated delays. After they asked for another week to respond in writing, she told them “I’m not giving you a week,” and ordered that the government respond by Monday with its reasoning for why the footage should not be released, while also telling them to be specific about what “sensitive materials” they claim are int he footage. She also criticized claims that the video of Marimar Martinez’s shooting could be characterized as part of an “ongoing investigation,” given that the charges against her were already dropped.
“If the government is going to rely on an ongoing investigation, I’m going to need a lot of detail about that ongoing investigation,” Alexakis reportedly told them. She could potentially provide a ruling on the case at the next hearing following the government’s response, scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 4, perhaps ordering the release of the body cam footage.
Again, I wonder if one of the goons present at the Marimar Martinez shooting was recognizably involved in the murder of Alex Pretti.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) Jan 29, 2026 at 11:18 AM
The Shooting of Marimar Martinez
It’s not hard to see why the government has been fighting so hard to prevent the release of footage of the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Chicago, considering that almost everything about this particular story has seemed deeply suspicious from the start. In her own words, Martinez was out running errands on Oct. 4, 2025 when she noticed what she figured were agents of ICE (they were actually Border Patrol, not that the distinction really matters) in SUVs. She decided on the spot to follow them, repeatedly beeping her horn as others in the city had been doing to alert nearby residents to the presence of ICE.
“So I started beeping my horn,” Martinez said in a video interview with CNN. “As a Mexican-American, first-generation U.S. citizen, I felt it was my responsibility to let my neighborhood know that ICE agents were near.”
The first DHS statements about the incident, meanwhile, claimed that law enforcement officers had been “ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles. One woman, Marimar Martinez, driving one of the vehicles, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxxing federal agents. She took defensive five from CBP agents.” This Border Patrol agent was later identified in court as Charles Exum.
DHS spokesperson and professional serial liar Tricia McLaughlin repeated this narrative, claiming that no fewer than 10 cars had “boxed in” the federal agents, when in reality it was apparently merely two vehicles. She also stressed that Martinez “was armed with a semi-automatic weapon,” making it sound as if Martinez had fired on or attempted to fire on agents, when instead she merely happened to have a handgun (a valid gun and concealed-carry license) in her purse when arrested. It echoes the same rhetoric as was present in the death of Alex Pretti, who also had a gun on him that he at no point attempted to use, illustrating the government’s attempt to strip the rights granted by the first ten amendments from only those Americans it perceives as political enemies. FBI director Kash Patel, who recently claimed that Americans couldn’t bring a gun to a protest, and live tweeted about Martinez’s arrest at the time and embedded a video that turned out to be from an entirely different incident, claiming it was evidence of Martinez’s guilt. Patel never deleted that tweet, and it is still visible, even after the government was forced to drop its assault claims against Martinez.
Federal agents cornered Marimar Martinez, shot her several times, boasted about it, arrested her, lied about her to the public and in the police report, and falsely charged her with assaulting them.
Now the government wants to keep evidence of their lies secret to protect these agents’ “privacy.”
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) Jan 29, 2026 at 10:47 AM
In the body camera footage that Martinez and her attorney have seen, but has been restricted from public view, meanwhile, a Border Patrol agent—possibly Exum, but it’s not clear—can reportedly be heard speaking to Martinez through the window of the car, taunting her and saying “Do something, bitch,” immediately before the shooting. Attorney Chris Parente says that the video depicts “an agent turning a federal vehicle left into Martinez’s vehicle, after which an agent says ‘Do something, bitch.’ The agent then exits the vehicle and shoots at Martinez.”
In court hearings after the shooting, CBP Agent Charles Exum came off poorly, particularly when it was revealed that he had sent text messages to friends and family after the incident in which he seemed to be boasting about his shooting of Martinez. As he reportedly sent in a text at the time: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.” Friends appeared to respond with laughing emojis. When questioned about why he was boasting of this accomplishment by Parente in court, Exum said merely, “I am a firearms instructor and I take pride in my shooting skills.”
All in all, the government case against Martinez collapsed on multiple fronts, including the revelation that Charles Exum had been allowed to transport his own Border Patrol vehicle involved in the incident 1,000 miles away to his home state of Maine, where it allegedly underwent repairs that just-so-happened to remove physical evidence of the altercation. It’s little wonder that U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis chose to dismiss the charges with prejudice, ensuring that the government can’t bring them against Martinez again.
If the same judge ultimately rules next week for the release of the body cam footage from this particular shooting, it may elevate the notoriety of the Marimar Martinez shooting to similar levels of the incidents with Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, at a time when the Trump administration is already flinging blame and attempting to move the national conversation away from violence perpetrated against Americans by federal agents. Here’s hoping that Martinez is able to be vindicated, months after enduring a close brush with death at the hands of Trump’s Gestapo.
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