On Oct. 4, Marimar Martinez, a teacher’s assistant in a Montessori school, was driving in Chicago when she observed federal immigration agents on patrol. She had begun to honk her horn to warn her neighbors about their presence when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Moments later, the agent in the vehicle, Charles Exum, fired multiple shots into Martinez’s car, hitting her again and again. (Later, Exum would brag to colleagues that he had “fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes.”)
Prosecutors for the government charged Martinez with assaulting a federal officer and accused her of trying to ram Exum with her car. The Department of Homeland Security described her actions as domestic terrorism, a charge the agency would repeat after the death of Renee Good in January at the hands of another immigration agent.
The government’s case unraveled, however, when it became clear that its story did not fit the evidence — evidence that officials with Customs and Border Protection tried to hide. The government dropped its case against Martinez a month later, and last Friday a federal judge authorized the release of the body camera footage so that the public could see the incident for itself.
Recently, Martinez joined with other Americans brutalized by federal immigration agents to tell their stories to a forum of congressional Democrats led by Representative Robert Garcia of California and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the top Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Garcia and Blumenthal convened the event to collect testimony on — and highlight — “the violent tactics and disproportionate use of force by agents of the Department of Homeland Security.”
The people who testified spoke to the terror of their confrontations with masked, armed and often trigger-happy federal agents. “I will never forget the fear, and having to quickly duck my head as the shots were fired at the passenger side of the car. Any one of those bullets could have killed me or two people I love,” said Martin Daniel Rascon, who was stopped by agents who broke the windows of the vehicle he was in and began firing when the driver, frightened, tried to escape.
If democracy rests on mutual recognition, on our capacity to see each other as full and equal persons, then the power to speak and be heard lies at the foundation of democratic life. It is when we speak — when we argue, appeal, explain and testify — that we put into practice our belief in the ability of others to understand, reason and empathize. Or as Thomas Jefferson remarked in 1824, “In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.”
Thus far, growing public opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection has been a function of the power of the image — of videos of shootings and abuse — but the testimony of Martinez, Rascon and others should remind us of the power of words and personal experience to also move the public. Crucially, there is the power inherent in giving victims of wrongdoing a chance to tell their stories, not as one perspective among many but as part of the official record.
Two examples of this dynamic stand out in American history.
In 1871, Congress convened the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Conditions of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, better known as “the Klan hearings,” on account of its focus: vigilante violence against the formerly enslaved. The committee, the historian Kidada E. Williams writes in “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction,” “traveled to hot spots of southern disorder, where they solicited testimony from officeholders, voters, accused participants and their victims.” Overall, the hearings “yielded thirteen volumes of firsthand testimonies, including from Black victims.” Hundreds of Black men and women spoke of terror, intimidation, wanton killings and sexual violence. “African Americans,” Williams writes, “told their stories of world-unraveling violence and asked federal officials and their fellow citizens to respect their rights.”
A little more than a century later, in 1980, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, an official federal investigation into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The commission held 20 days of hearings in cities across the country and heard testimony from more than 750 witnesses, many of them on the West Coast, including “evacuees, former government officials, public figures, interested citizens and historians.” The evacuees, or rather victims, spoke in their testimony to deep feelings of injustice and a powerful sense that the federal government had robbed them of their dignity. “We took whatever we could carry,” said one person interned as a child. “So much we left behind, but the most valuable thing I lost was my freedom.” Victims also spoke about conditions in the camps that should sound familiar to anyone who has read recent accounts about ICE detention facilities. “The garbage cans were overflowing, human excreta was found next to the doors of the cabins and the drainage boxes into which dishwater and kitchen waste was to be placed were filthy beyond description.”
The public attention associated with the Klan hearings helped suppress anti-black vigilante violence in the South, but only for a time. Ultimately, the hearings did not produce the kind of legislation or federal effort that would have secured the promise of equal citizenship for the formerly enslaved. The more recent commission and hearings on Japanese internment, on the other hand, did lead to congressional action, and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed a law that acknowledged and apologized for the injustice of internment, which gave reparations to surviving internees or their heirs.
In her book, Williams observes that
Societies experiencing atrocities struggle to put a stop to and then meaningfully address them. Perpetrators want to advance their aims to the end and propagate baseless lies to do it. Victims want violence to stop, and they want justice. A small cadre of observers believes in justice and accountability. The rest, especially those who are safe from being targeted, and atrocities’ passive beneficiaries, simply want to move on and wipe the historical slate clean.
This was true of the violence suffered by Black Americans during Reconstruction. It has been true, in fact, for all manner of violence either committed or sanctioned by the federal government. But while the odds are somewhat against a serious reckoning with the brutality and wrongdoing of Trump’s mass deportation effort, it does not have to be true of the atrocities of ICE and the Border Patrol. If it is, it is because we made it so.
With that in mind, any serious push to account for the actions of this government — to abolish the president’s private army, restructure immigration enforcement and punish anyone responsible for wrongdoing — must include recompense and repair for its victims. And looking ahead to a Democratic-led House, or Senate or both, the first step in that journey must be more of the kind of public investigation and testimony we’ve already seen in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago and wherever else the administration has made its mark. The American people need to know the full story of what has been done in our name. And the people we’ve wronged deserve their chance to speak and be heard.
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