Woman Shot by Border Patrol Says Agent Appeared to Take “Trophy” Photo

A federal agent used his cell phone to take a picture of Marimar Martinez after she was shot five times by Border Patrol in Chicago—a chilling image that haunts her to this day.

Martinez testified in Congress Tuesday about how she was shot after she followed an agent’s car in Chicago while trying to warn her neighbors. DHS initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” She was charged with felony assault of a federal officer despite ending up in the hospital herself.

In her testimony, Martinez revealed a new detail about what happened after she was shot.

“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave. I told him I did not consent … but he did not care. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”

Why did a federal agent keep coming into Martinez’s room while she lay in her hospital bed? And why did he have to take her picture if she had already been arrested, if not to keep a “trophy” for himself as Martinez suggested? Recall that Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, bragged in text messages afterward, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

While ICE has reportedly been scanning protesters’ faces, this instance feels much more personal.

Renee Good’s brother hoped her senseless killing at the hands of a federal agent would have brought an end to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown. Instead, he hasn’t seen any change.

Addressing a public congressional meeting Tuesday to examine the violent tactics of Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement agents, Luke Ganger spoke about his sister, who was the first U.S. citizen to be shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last month.

“In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country, and it has not,” he said.

“The completely surreal scenes taking place on the streets of Minneapolis are beyond explanation. This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents. These encounters with federal agents are changing the community, and changing many lives, including ours, forever,” he said. “I still don’t know how to explain to my four-year-old what these agents are doing when we pass by.”

Ganger said his four-year-old daughter “knows that her aunt died and that somebody caused it to happen.”

“She told me that there are no bad people and that everyone makes mistakes. She has Nee’s spirit,” he said. His sister, he said, “carried peace, patience, and love for others wherever she went.”

“Our family is a very American blend,” Ganger continued. “We vote differently, and we rarely completely agree on the finer details of what it means to be a citizen of this country. We attend various churches, and some not at all. And despite those differences, we have always treated each other with love and respect. And we’ve gotten even closer during this very divided time in our country. And we hope that our family can be even a small example to others not to let political ideals divide us, to be good like Renee.

“But the most important thing we can do today is to help this panel and our country understand who Nee is, and what a beautiful American we have lost. A sister, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and a friend.”

Ganger’s call for unity bears repeating. Not a single Republican congressperson—the very same people who want you to believe that Good deserved to die—bothered to attend Tuesday’s forum.

Also testifying were Brent Ganger, another brother of Good; Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

The White House may have pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to.

The Illinois Department of Public Health sidestepped the federal government this week by independently joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. It is the second state to do so, after California joined the network last month.

Illinois officials said the decision was made in part to keep the state informed on the latest global health data.

“We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”

Vohra underscored that it was critical that Illinois remain up-to-date with accurate information about surging health threats around the world, citing the Marburg virus outbreak that appeared in Ethiopia last week.

“This provides the real-time information to us,” Vohra said of GOARN. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to relay that, if and when that might happen, we’ll get direct access to that network of information.”

The Trump administration completed the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO on January 22. In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the global public health entity had failed not only in its efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic but also to reform itself in the years since.

Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.

“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”

Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task.

Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast.

Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast.

“Such a fucking dope,” another person said.

“Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”

Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.

“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast.

Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office.

Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”

“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.