A US citizen who was shot one year ago by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent during a sweeping immigration crackdown in Chicago filed a lawsuit against the federal government on Monday, alleging the agent lied about the shooting and fired into her vehicle from behind.
Federal prosecutors initially accused Marimar Martinez, then ۳۰, of using her vehicle to strike and box in agent Charles Exum’s sport utility vehicle on Chicago’s south-west side on ۴ October ۲۰۲۵ during what the Trump administration named Operation Midway Blitz. Exum then exited his car and opened fire, leaving Martinez with seven gunshot wounds.
In the month after the shooting, prosecutors filed to dismiss the charges in a dramatic reversal of the closely watched case in the US’s third largest city.
Martinez’s lawyers said on Monday that they commissioned an expert to analyze bullet trajectories and her injuries – and determined Exum wasn’t in the path of her car when he opened fire. They said he had walked several feet toward her car, contrary to statements he made to the FBI, and fired off five shots in less than a second, the last from the rear side of her vehicle.
“Charles Exum told the FBI agent on that day, within hours of the shooting, that Marimar was driving her car directly at him, that he shot her five times through the windshield, and that he ceased firing once he was no longer in the path of the vehicle,” one of her attorneys, Chris Parente, said. “Those are three objective lies that you’ll see here today.”
Parente said there were only three bullet holes in Martinez’s windshield on the right passenger side, which indicated she wasn’t driving toward the agent. He said the fourth shot was fired through the front passenger side window, adding another bullet hole in the back of Martinez’s car seat showed the agent fired the fifth shot from behind her.
“In what world can a US law enforcement officer stand behind a car and fire his Glock service weapon through the rear passenger window at a young woman who’s crouched over the steering wheel?” Parente said.
The CBP said in a statement to the Associated Press responding to the suit that Exum had been placed on administrative leave. Use-of-force cases were “thoroughly investigated, reviewed, and presented” to an independent board, it added.
Exum is not a defendant in the lawsuit against the US government, which was filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act and does not allow for lawsuits against individual agents. It was not known where Exum could be reached.
Body-worn camera footage from another agent in Exum’s vehicle before the shooting captured the agents saying it was “time to get aggressive” and making other profanity-laced comments encouraging violence, according to the complaint.
The FBI arrested Martinez, taking her out of the hospital just hours after the shooting when she was “wheelchair bound and her bullet holes were leaking blood through her bandages”, according to the lawsuit. A judge ordered her release two days after her arrest.
Messages released by Martinez’s attorneys in February showed that former border patrol chief Greg Bovino had praised Exum for his “excellent service in Chicago” after the shooting. Other messages they released showed agents in a group chat congratulating Exum and calling him a “legend”.
Martinez was one of several people shot in their cars by federal agents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. An immigration agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan delivery driver in his car in Austin, Texas, in September, and another fatally shot a Colombian driver in Biddeford, Maine, in July.
The Trump administration has at times justified such shootings as self-defense against people allegedly weaponizing their vehicles.
Martinez appeared with her attorneys at a news conference on Monday, saying the various shootings spurred her to file suit.
Referring to Renee Good, a US citizen shot dead in her vehicle by a federal agent in Minneapolis in January, Martinez said: “If I don’t, then who else, you know? Look at what happened to Renee and all these victims.
“What’s happening is not normal. We shouldn’t stay here and normalize what’s happening,” she said.
