Woman shot by immigration agents in Chicago charged as state leaders take to airwaves to blame Trump for escalation
Published in News & Features
A woman and man are charged with assault for allegedly ramming their vehicle into a car carrying federal immigration agents on Chicago’s Southwest Side on Saturday, prompting one of the agents to open fire.
Marimar Martinez, 30, and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, 21, both of Chicago, are each charged in a criminal complaint filed Sunday with forcibly assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law enforcement officer.
The agent who was driving was unable to move his vehicle and exited the car, at which point he fired approximately five shots from his service weapon at Martinez, the complaint stated. Martinez was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where she received treatment for gunshot wounds and was released into FBI custody.
Initial court appearances have not been set. It was not clear if either defendant had retained an attorney.
According to the complaint, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent was driving south of Pershing Road near the intersection of West 39th Place and South Kedzie Avenue on Saturday with two other CBP agents as passengers.
The officers were acting as a “security detail” at the time, and were “followed by a convoy of civilian vehicles,” including a silver Nissan Rogue driven by Martinez and a black GMC Envoy driven by Ruiz, according to the complaint.
“The convoy of civilian vehicles followed the agents closely and pursued the (border patrol agents) aggressively,” the complaint stated, including “disobeying traffic laws, including running red lights and stop signs, driving in the wrong lane, and driving the wrong way down one-way streets.”
Martinez drove off but paramedics discovered her and her vehicle at a repair shop about a mile away, according to the complaint. Ruiz also drove away after the collisions, but law enforcement located him and his vehicle at a gas station about a half block away, the complaint stated.
All three agents were equipped with body-worn cameras, but only the camera of one of the passengers was switched on at the time of the incident, according to the complaint.
In separate national television interviews, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, also a Democrat, warned about a pattern of lies emanating from DHS and the Trump administration regarding ICE’s aggressive enforcement.
Pritzker acknowledged on CNN’s “State of the Union” show that “it’s really hard to know exactly what the facts are, and they won’t let us access the facts. They are just putting out their propaganda, and then we’ve got to later determine what actually happened.”
Asked about the shooting incident, Duckworth said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” “Well, they lie right? The Trump administration lies. We have a president who’s a known liar, and they have been, they’ve been lying about the situation all along.”
Both accused Trump and aggressive federal immigration enforcement of creating confrontation.
“They are using Gestapo tactics in Chicago, and this is what Trump wants to do, right? He wants to intimidate the people of Chicago. That’s not going to happen,” Duckworth said.
Pritzker said it was the Trump administration and federal agents who “are the ones that are making it a war zone. They need to get out of Chicago if they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the President said they were going to do. They need to get the heck out.
“They want mayhem on the ground. They want to create the war zone so that they can send in even more troops,” Pritzker said.
Activists and “rapid response” volunteers — people tracking agents across the city in an effort to disrupt their actions by warning of their presence and filming arrests — have shared a far different initial summary than the government.
“Our understanding of part of the incident this morning is that ICE’s car collided with a civilian car and then agents shot five bullets,” said Brandon Lee, a spokesperson for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.
An online video purported to be of the collision was circulating Sunday on social media, but the shooting itself was not captured.
Elizabeth Ruiz, 51, said federal agents rammed the back of a car driven by her son, Anthony Ruiz, after the shooting. The mother said the agents then detained her son, a 21-year-old U.S. citizen, and confiscated the car.
“They turned it all around,” she said of the Trump administration’s description of what happened.
Ruiz said she was on the phone with her son when the shooting began.
When she arrived at the scene, agents took him into custody. They later told her he could be released Monday, she said.
“It was one of your guys that rammed my son, why are you arresting him?” she recalled telling the agents after they detained him.
The shooting occurred on the same day that Pritzker announced the Trump administration had authorized a historic federalized deployment of National Guard members to the Chicago area over the governor’s objections.
That news stemmed from a memo sent Saturday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Illinois National Guard leadership stating that up to 300 of its members will be called into federal service “effective immediately” for a period of 60 days.
According to the memo, which was obtained by the Tribune, the president called on guard members to protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Protective Service, and other federal government personnel “who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where violent demonstrations against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.”
The memo didn’t specify exactly where the deployments would take place, but said the chief of the National Guard Bureau, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the commander of U.S. Northern Command would coordinate details about the mobilization with the Illinois Guard.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul did not have specific plans to file new lawsuits against Trump’s administration early Sunday, after the Saturday news of the impending National Guard deployment and a Trump-appointed judge’s decision to issue a temporary restraining order blocking their deployment in Oregon.
Raoul spokesperson Annie Thompson said the attorney general “is firmly committed to upholding the Constitution and defending the rule of law” in a statement shared Sunday morning.
“Our office will not hesitate to take legal action in the event of any unlawful deployment anywhere in Illinois,” Thompson wrote.
One day after the shooting, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem discussed the incident during an appearance on Fox News.
She called Chicago a “war zone” and contended the growing intensity of protests against federal law enforcement was part of an “unprecedented” effort by well-funded outside organizers and networks who are now being investigated by the government.
“We had a really strange incident yesterday where we had a caravan of 10 different vehicles that were following our border patrol agents and officers that were out there on the streets of Chicago, and they had followed them and gotten them cornered, pinned them down. And then our agents, when getting out of their cars, they tried to run them over and had semi-automatic handguns on them, to where our agents had to protect themselves, and shots were fired, and an individual ended up in the hospital that was attacking these officers,” Noem said.
“You know this individual had threatened them previously and had told them that they all needed to go down and shouted expletives at them,” she said. “So our intelligence indicates that these people are organized. They’re getting more and more people on their team, as far as attacking officers, and they’re making plans to ambush them and to kill them. We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads. It’s been $2,000 to kidnap them, $10,000 to kill them. They’ve released their pictures, they’ve sent them between their networks, and it’s an extremely dangerous situation and unprecedented.”
Noem said a “protective detail” has been placed around federal agents who have been identified by protesters and that immigration enforcement officials have “changed some of our operations to keep our officers safe.”
“But make no mistake, this isn’t just about, you know, protesting free speech or that they don’t like that. People out here are upholding the law of our country. They’re actually going out there and saying, ‘Kill these people, and we’ll give you this much money to do it,’” she said.
On her television appearance Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard, sought to downplay potential confrontations with the Trump-ordered deployment of 300 Illinois National Guard members.
“So they’ll be homegrown Illinoisans, and they’re our brothers and sisters, our neighbors. I probably served with quite a number of them, certainly the leadership. And, you know, they’ll be home. We’ll welcome them,” she said.
“It’s a misuse of the National Guard. They’re not needed, but we’re going to welcome them, because they’re our brothers and sisters, and we’re proud of our National Guard,” she said.
Among those caught up in the activity in recent days was Ald. Jessie Fuentes.
Nearly every elected official in Chicago City Hall has signed a letter condemning her detainment Friday by federal agents.
Agents grabbed Fuentes, 26th Ward, and roughly handcuffed her in a Humboldt Park hospital emergency room as she demanded they show her a warrant for an injured man they had also detained. She was released moments later after insisting the agents say what crime she had committed.
Fuentes’ arrest is “not new, nor an isolated incident,” said the letter listing Mayor Brandon Johnson’s name first and also signed by 37 aldermen.
“ICE agents continue to violate civil liberties with impunity, and if we continue to allow this erosion of due process to go unchecked, we risk undermining the foundation of our democracy,” it said.
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(Tribune reporters Jeremy Gorner and Caroline Kubzansky contributed to this story.)
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