“CBP agents shot the Chicago woman and U.S. citizen five times last October after her vehicle was involved in a collision with an SUV with Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Charles Exum.
The federal government charged Marimar with ramming border patrol agents.
Those charges were later dropped. Marimar was one of many, calling the administration’s narratives into question on Tuesday.
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Martinez followed the agents for several blocks before the vehicles collided, resulting in minor dents and scrapes on both vehicles.
According to testimony and documents from Martinez’s now-dropped assault case, she stopped her vehicle directly after the collision and the agents’ SUV came to a halt just ahead of Martinez. She then accelerated away, testifying in court that she swerved left to avoid hitting the agents, who were exiting their vehicle.
That’s when the agents opened fire, ultimately striking Martinez five times in the arm, chest and both legs. Only one of the three agents had a body camera activated at the time.
While the body camera footage hasn’t been released publicly, lawyers for Martinez have said in court that it shows an officer shouting “do something b–.”
The agent who shot her allegedly said in a group text to friends: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.””
“Less than two days after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to restrict immigration agents from using riot control weapons, including chemical irritants, a Chicago-area couple and their 1-year-old daughter were pepper-sprayed during their Saturday morning grocery run.
On Saturday morning, the Veraza family was on its way to Sam’s Club in Cicero, a Chicago suburb near the epicenter of the federal government’s immigration enforcement campaign known as “Operation Midway Blitz.” Upon hearing a helicopter and car horns, which are often used by community members to signal immigration enforcement activity in progress, they decided to leave. That’s when a black pickup truck, captured on video by the car’s passenger, drove past their vehicle while a masked agent sprayed a chemical irritant through the car’s open driver’s side window. A cloud of spray hit the driver, Rafael Veraza, in the face, affecting him, his wife, and his 1-year-old daughter, Ariana, in the back seat. The video then cuts to Rafael and his wife trying to wash out Ariana’s eyes as she cries.
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In response to questions regarding the incident, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin sent a statement to the A.P. claiming “there was no crowd control or pepper spray deployed in a Sam’s Club parking lot.””
“Using military personnel for domestic law enforcement is dangerous and fraught, and any political leader who does it should be held strictly accountable for the consequences. Given the absence of any real need for militarized law enforcement in Chicago, it would be a grave abuse of power for the president to send any troops there on a law-enforcement pretext — as it was when he mobilized the National Guard for law enforcement in Washington, D.C. But for more than one reason, that mobilization in D.C. is easier to defend constitutionally than sending the Texas National Guard to Chicago would be. Justifiably or not, constitutional law treats all of D.C. as an exception to the McCulloch principle: The people of D.C. are, as a general matter, subject to a lawmaking authority — Congress — that they play no part in electing. (That’s why some D.C. license plates bear the protest slogan, “Taxation Without Representation.”) But regardless of whether that exception is justified in D.C., it has absolutely no application in Illinois. Like Nebraskans and Pennsylvanians and Kansans, Illinoisians are constitutionally entitled to be constituents of whatever body governs them.
Any military force is likely to behave with less restraint toward a population to which its leaders are not responsible than toward a population to which its leaders must answer democratically. If the Texas National Guard behaves poorly in Chicago, the locals have no electoral mechanism for holding Texas authorities to account. The governor of Texas never appears on any ballot in Illinois. He has nothing to fear, politically, from the people his National Guard will police. Surely a militarization at the hands of a non-responsible power is no less tyrannical, and no more constitutional, than a tax imposed by one.”
“Over the past five years, Chicago taxpayers have forked over nearly $400 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from officer misconduct, according to a new analysis of city data. While around 1,300 police officers were named in the lawsuits, just 200 were responsible for more than 40 percent of the total cost.”
“As a direct result of one-party misrule (there are zero Republicans on the 50-seat City Council), Chicago’s tax base is decreasing, not increasing. The population has declined for nine consecutive years, is shrinking by an annual rate of 1 percent, and is at its lowest point in more than a century.
Illinois, where Democrats control the governorship and a two-thirds majority of the legislature, lost “an estimated $3.6 billion in income tax revenue in 2022 alone, a year the net loss of 87,000 residents subtracted $9.8 billion in adjusted gross income,” syndicated columnist and Illinois native George Will observed last week. “In the past six years, $47.5 billion [adjusted gross income] has left….Illinois leads the nation in net losses of households making 200,000 or more.”
None of these or other grisly Windy City stats—including the murders and the pension liabilities—are obscure. As Illinois Policy Institute Vice President Austin Berg put it Saturday night at a live taping of the Fifth Column podcast, “I believe Chicago is the greatest American city, and the worst-governed American city.””
“Left-leaning Janet Protasiewicz won resoundingly in her bid for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, despite being labeled “No Jail Janet” by her opponents. Democrats noted that her opponent, Dan Kelly, was connected to a plan to reverse the 2020 election results.
Similarly, Brandon Johnson, a Chicago union organizer, was hammered by his rival for previously leaning into the “defund the police” movement. But he stressed that his opponent Paul Vallas was not actually a Democrat, forcing him to repeatedly defend his credentials.