CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors have moved to drop charges against a woman shot by a Border Patrol agent in October in a significant reversal in one of the government’s most high-profile criminal cases tied to the Trump administration’s Chicago-focused “Operation Midway Blitz.”
Prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois on Thursday morning filed the motion to dismiss the case against 30-year-old Marimar Martinez and her co-defendant, 21-year-old Anthony Ruiz. No reason for the dismissal was given in the motion filed hours before a scheduled status hearing, though attorneys for the defendants criticized the weakness of the government’s case from the start.
U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis will rule on the motion Thursday afternoon.
Justice Department officials have declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.
Martinez and Ruiz were indicted last month on federal charges of assault and attempted murder of a federal employee with a deadly or dangerous weapon. Border Patrol agents alleged the two were part of a caravan that followed them to the city’s Southwest Side, boxed the federal agents in and rammed their vehicle before Border Patrol agent Charles Exum drew his weapon and shot Martinez five times. Both Martinez and Ruiz pleaded not guilty.
The Oct. 4 incident prompted protests and aggressive standoffs with federal agents who deployed tear gas and stun grenade devices — a scene the Trump administrated referenced, along with the alleged actions by Martinez and Ruiz, as justification for deploying the National Guard to Chicago.
But the government’s allegations were called into question almost immediately.
A Department of Homeland Security news release the day of the alleged ramming described one of the drivers, later identified as Martinez, as being “armed with a semi-automatic weapon.” An eight-page criminal complaint submitted a day later made no mention of the firearm. Her attorney, Chris Parente, said in an interview that Martinez never brandished her licensed firearm, which remained in her purse.
At the October pretrial detention hearing where the judge released the defendants on bond, Parente described video captured by one of the agents’ body cameras that he said showed it was U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who crashed into Martinez’s vehicle and that Exum had pointed his gun at her and threatened her before shooting.
The government’s case appeared under increasing strain as revelations emerged in pretrial hearings that Exum had been authorized to drive his work vehicle — a key piece of evidence in the case — 1,100 miles back to his base in Maine. Text messages Exum sent after the shooting also showed him appearing to brag to colleagues about his marksmanship.
“I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your books boys,” a message presented during the court hearing stated.
The Trump administration has amassed repeated judicial losses during its immigration operation in Illinois, including a federal judge’s decision to temporarily block deploying National Guard members from deploying there, after noting she had observed a “lack of credibility” from federal officials in how they described incidents and conditions that were often later contradicted by the evidence.
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