A woman shot by an immigration agent Saturday was one of two people charged with assault for allegedly ramming a vehicle into a car federal authorities were using during operations on Chicago’s Southwest Side.
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 later taken by ambulance to a hospital, where she received treatment for gunshot wounds and was released into federal custody.
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News of the charges came as state leaders blamed President Donald Trump for the escalation and for not being truthful about what is happening on the ground in Chicago. In separate national television interviews, Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats, warned about a pattern of lies emanating from the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration regarding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s aggressive tactics.
“It’s really hard to know exactly what the facts are, and they won’t let us access the facts,” Pritzker acknowledged on CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “They are just putting out their propaganda, and then we’ve got to later determine what actually happened.”
Asked on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” about the shooting incident, Duckworth said, “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.”
Martinez’s father declined to discuss the situation in a phone call. Another relative declined to comment at their home except to say that Martinez was recovering and in federal custody, referring further questions to an attorney.
Martinez’s attorney, Christopher Parente, confirmed Sunday afternoon that Martinez is in federal custody. He said he has not yet met with the charged woman and expects an initial court hearing to occur Monday.
Parente said he had little information to share about the case and was waiting on more information to surface during discovery.
“The biggest thing now is in no way is she a danger to the community or risk of flight, so she should be released. I’m disappointed that the government is seeking her detention,” he said. “Hopefully, we will get her released tomorrow.”
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” 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 after the shooting 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 the camera of only one of the passengers was switched on at the time of the incident, according to the complaint. Authorities said a gun was recovered. On social media accounts that appeared to be linked to Martinez, who has described herself as a concealed carry license holder.
Both Pritzker and Duckworth 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?” Duckworth said. “He wants to intimidate the people of Chicago. That’s not going to happen.”
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 later a DHS spokeswoman said on social media that it was from a separate incident.
In that video, a black Chevrolet sports utility vehicle speeds into a white truck a few feet in front of it that has flashing law enforcement lights.
The SUV’s passenger-side window rolls down as the driver continues to repeatedly crash into the truck. The SUV then accelerates and pushes the truck far forward. Farther down the road, the truck stops and its driver gets out with a handgun drawn and pointed at the SUV.
Another black SUV speeds to the scene and attempts to box in the Chevrolet from behind. Law enforcement agents get out of the second SUV as the Chevrolet pulls away and then crashes.
“This is from ANOTHER vehicular assault later that day in Chicago where an individual rammed an (ICE) vehicle,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote on X.
Martinez previously had no contact with law enforcement, a Tribune analysis of court records showed.
A man filed in Cook County a lawsuit against her in 2020, claiming she had rear-ended his car in McKinley Park. Martinez initially denied the accusations, but later settled the lawsuit out of court for an undisclosed sum.
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The man’s initial complaint noted Martinez drove a Chevrolet, the same type of vehicle seen in videos shared to social media purportedly showing Saturday’s incident.
On Facebook, Martinez did not appear to post about political issues to her own page. In a video shared to Facebook last week, she fires a gun at a shooting range.
“Guess who get her ccl,” text posted with the video says, an apparent reference to a concealed carry license.
Other posts show the account’s holder riding horses and attending a recent Chicago Fire soccer match, as well as a trip to Paris and London in January.
Ruiz’s mother, Elizabeth Ruiz, on Sunday afternoon referred questions to her son’s lawyer, a federal public defender. The attorney declined to comment when reached by phone.
Cook County court records show that Anthony Ruiz, 21, has accumulated a handful of misdemeanor traffic violations and no serious criminal history. His mother said he was using a temporary driver’s license.
Saturday she said her son had left their Gage Park home to pick up some friends for a movie not long before he called her from the Brighton Park gas station, saying that agents had hit his car from behind and started shooting. Ruiz said she arrived at the gas station shortly before agents arrested her son, around 11 a.m.
Hours later, Elizabeth Ruiz, her husband and younger son were still at the scene of the shooting when Anthony Ruiz called from the Metropolitan Correctional Center. They expected him to appear before a federal judge Monday.
Ruiz on Saturday said federal agents rammed the back of a car driven by her son.
“They turned it all around,” she said of the Trump administration’s description of what happened.
“It was one of your guys that rammed my son, why are you arresting him?” she recalled telling the agents after they detained him.
One day after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem discussed the incident during an appearance on Fox News.
She called Chicago a “war zone” and contended that 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.
DHS officials Saturday had said Martinez appeared in a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol bulletin last week because of online comments she purportedly made. McLaughlin quoted the post as saying: “let’s (expletive) those mother (expletives) up, don’t let them take anyone.”
Asked about the alleged threats, a DHS spokesperson shared screenshots of two posts apparently made by Martinez in which she reshared posts made by other people that named federal agents. “They found him lol,” she wrote in both posts.
Noem appeared to address the alleged threats Sunday on television.
“You know this individual had threatened them previously and had told them that they all needed to go down and shouted expletives at them,” Noem 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.”
Among the local officials caught up in the increase in DHS activity in recent days was Ald. Jessie Fuentes, 26th.
Nearly every elected official in Chicago’s City Hall has signed a letter condemning her detainment on Friday by federal agents.
Agents grabbed Fuentes 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.
Johnson has not commented on the shooting, but is expected to take reporters’ questions Monday.
Ald. Julia Ramirez, 12th, said Sunday evening she still didn’t have much clear information about Saturday’s incident on the Southwest Side. She criticized federal agents for their response after the crash and shooting, arguing they could have left more quickly to avoid the tense standoff with protesters.
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“I felt like they were very calculated in how they kept deploying a further and further amount of force,” she said.
The neighborhood was quiet Sunday, Ramirez said. That silence, and what could come next, troubled her, she said.
Tribune reporter Adriana Pérez contributed.