The Government Called Her a Domestic Terrorist. Then a Federal Judge Made It Release the Video.

Marimar Martinez is a U.S. citizen, a teacher's aide at a Montessori school, and a lifelong Chicagoan. A Border Patrol agent shot her five times. Within hours, DHS called her a "domestic terrorist". Federal prosecutors dropped the case seven weeks later.

Marimar Martinez is a U.S. citizen and a lifelong Chicagoan. A Border Patrol agent shot her five times. Within hours, DHS called her a domestic terrorist. Seven weeks later federal prosecutors dropped the case, and a judge forced the government to release the video.

Marimar was taking clothes to her church.

It was a Saturday morning in October, the fourth, and Marimar Martinez was driving through Brighton Park, the Chicago neighborhood she has lived in her whole life. She is thirty years old. She works as a teacher's aide at a Montessori school. She had a donation of clothes in the car.

Then she saw the SUV.

Federal immigration agents had been working in her neighborhood for weeks. She looked closer, and there were uniformed Border Patrol agents inside. So she did what a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods have started doing. She followed them, leaned on her horn, and shouted "la migra" out the window to warn whoever might be listening for around 15 minutes.

Then came the shooting.

Two to three feet

Near the corner of 39th Street and Kedzie Avenue, Martinez's Nissan Rogue was traveling two to three feet to the left of the agents' Chevrolet Tahoe. Agents were traveling alongside her.

We know what was happening inside that Tahoe, because there were body cameras running on the agents who were not driving.

Suddenly, the agents change their minds.

On the body cam footage, one agent says, "Do something, b---h." Another points a handgun toward the window.

Another agent in the car says: "Alright, it's time to get aggressive." "We're going to make contact."

On the footage, the driver's steering wheel turns to the left. Toward her car. The two vehicles collide.

A voice says, "We've been struck, we've been struck."

Five rounds

The agent driving was Charles Exum. He has been an immigration agent since 2005. He is stationed in Maine and was in Chicago on a temporary assignment to an operation the U.S. Attorney's office would later call the largest law enforcement surge in the history of the Northern District of Illinois.

Exum stopped the Tahoe, got out, and fired five rounds.

His own body camera was not recording.

Martinez was still moving. She has said she felt a burning in her arms and her legs and thought, in that first instant, that she had been hit with pepper balls. So she kept driving. She veered left until she struck a curb.

Then she heard her rear passenger window shatter.

"I looked down and noticed blood gushing out of my arms and legs," she told members of Congress under oath months later, "and realized I had been shot multiple times."

She drove roughly a mile to an auto repair shop, where the workers found her and called 911. An ambulance took her to a hospital. She was treated for gunshot wounds, and then she was taken into federal custody.

Photographs the government itself later released show the inside of her car covered in her blood.

What the government said that day

Within hours, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman was telling the public what had happened.

No agents were injured, she said. Martinez and a second man had "rammed" the agents' vehicle. They had "ambushed" the agents. They were, in the department's word, "domestic terrorists." And Martinez, the spokeswoman said, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon.

Martinez was never charged with a weapons offense. Not that day, not ever, in a case where federal prosecutors charged her with everything else they could think of.

Also within four hours of the shooting, Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino sent Charles Exum an email. It offered to extend his career past the mandatory retirement age of 57.

"In light of your excellent service in Chicago," Bovino wrote, "you have much yet left to do!!"

While Martinez was in a hospital bed, a colleague texted Exum: "You are a legend among agents you better f---in know that. Beers on me when I see you at training."

The next morning, October 5, the Department of Justice charged Marimar Martinez with having "forcibly assaulted, resisted, opposed, impeded, intimidated, and interfered with an officer of the United States."

She pleaded not guilty and asked for a speedy trial.

The vehicle goes to Maine

The Tahoe was the centerpiece of the government's case. If Martinez had rammed it, the damage would show.

The vehicle was taken to an FBI office to be processed for evidence. Hours later, Exum was told it was ready and that he was free to collect it. He drove it out of Illinois, across the country, three days, to his home duty station in Maine. It arrived on October 10.

It was evidence, a key piece of evidence. Her lawyers had not seen it.

On November 5, U.S. District Judge Georgia Alexakis summoned Exum into her courtroom to explain. He testified about scratches and dents and black marks on the driver's side. A supervisor's email went into the record:

If they needed it as evidence I did not think they would have released it from the investigation, had you drive three days all the way back to Maine, possibly destroying some of that evidence along the way if they still needed it.

On cross-examination, Martinez's attorney pointed to FBI reports stating that it was Exum himself, not a supervisor, who had asked for the vehicle to be worked on.

Hours before the texts

On November 20, defense attorneys were scheduled to reveal more of Charles Exum's text messages in open court.

That morning, before the hearing, two Assistant U.S. Attorneys filed a one-page motion to dismiss the case.

Judge Alexakis granted it that afternoon. She dismissed it with prejudice.

The government offered no explanation. Asked why, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office said only that the office is "constantly evaluating new facts and information" arising out of the Chicago operation.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment that day.

What the video showed

The case was over, but the evidence was still sealed. Martinez asked the court to release it. The government objected. Among its arguments was that publishing Exum's text messages would serve only to sully the agent, his family and his coworkers.

On February 6, 2026, Judge Alexakis ruled against the government. She noted that the administration had shown "zero concern about the sullying of Ms. Martinez's reputation." She found that the evidence carried "impeachment value" on Agent Exum's version of events.

Four days later, the U.S. Attorney's office released it.

The body camera footage shows Exum's steering wheel turning toward Martinez's car as the vehicles collide. Exum had told the FBI that he veered to the left *after* the collision, to create space.

A scene diagram drawn by a federal agent shows three vehicles stacked in front of the Tahoe. Those three vehicles are the reason the agents were supposedly boxed in. Surveillance footage from cameras nearby shows no vehicles there at all, and shows Martinez's car continuing forward, unblocked, after the shots.

No agent was injured.

And then there are the messages Exum sent afterward.

He forwarded a news story about the shooting to other agents with a note: "Read it. 5 shots, 7 holes. Put that in your book boys."

"Cool," he wrote in another. "I'm up for another round of 'f--k around and find out'."

"Sweet. My 15 mins of fame. Lmao."

In a group chat titled "Posse Chat," someone asked him whether his superiors were supportive. He replied: "Big time." Then he listed them. "Everyone has been including Chief Bovino, Chief Banks, Sec Noem and El Jefe himself ... according to Bovino."

The strongest case for Charles Exum

Exum and the agents with him had been followed and shadowed by a civilian vehicle for more than fifteen minutes. When two moving cars collide, the people inside each of them feel the impact without necessarily knowing who caused it. You can hear an agent in that Tahoe say "we've been struck," and there is no reason to assume he did not mean it.

An agent who genuinely believed his vehicle had just been rammed, by a driver who then kept moving past him, might form a real belief that he was in danger. He would have had two or three seconds to decide.

Exum also told other agents, within minutes, that this was the first time in a twenty-year career that he had used force. That is consistent with a man who was frightened rather than a man who was cold.

Yet shoot her, he did. 5 times. And then drove that vehicle more than a thousand miles to Maine, before her lawyers could examine it. On top of it all, his body camera was not on.

That doesn't make for the most compelling case.

Where it stands

Charles Exum has been placed on administrative leave. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that much, and said that significant use-of-force incidents are reviewed by a national board that includes representatives of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. The agency would not say when his leave began, or whether he is still on it.

He is also under criminal investigation. Not in Illinois, because he had served as a government witness there, but by the U.S. Attorney's office in South Bend, Indiana. Court testimony and filings establish it. That office declined to comment, citing the pending investigation. Months after the shooting, Martinez's car was still in federal custody because of it.

Martinez has filed an administrative claim against the Department of Homeland Security and against Exum personally. Under federal law she had to wait six months before she could sue. That six months runs out this month.

Marimar has not been compensated. She has not received so much as an apology.

And on the Department of Homeland Security's own website, after a federal judge dismissed the charges against her permanently, Marimar Martinez is still described as a domestic terrorist who ambushed federal agents.

"What about him?"

On April 22, 2026, Marimar Martinez sat in front of the House Homeland Security Committee and testified under oath.

She said she thinks about the shooting all the time. She said she had nightmares afterward, and that she still sometimes cannot sleep.

At one point she stood up, took off her jacket, and showed the members of Congress where the bullets went in.

She talked about the decision she made in the seconds after the first round hit her, the decision to keep driving instead of stopping.

"Imagine if I would've stayed," she said. "I wouldn't be here to testify. I wouldn't."

Then she said this:

I've been through hell and back, and I've fought for my freedom, I've fought for my voice. And these agents, Charles Exum has not even been held accountable for his actions. But when it comes to me, I had to fight. What about him?

Marimar was charged the day after the shooting.

Charles Exum has not been charged at all.