By Renee Hickman
CHICAGO, Feb 6 (Reuters) – A federal judge has lifted the protective order on bodycam footage, text messages and other evidence in the case of a Chicago woman who was shot multiple times by a Border Patrol agent during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation last fall.
District Judge Georgia N. Alexakis issued the decision on Friday, granting a request from Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen and Montessori school teacher who was shot while protesting against the immigration surge in October.
Martinez, 30, was accused by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of ramming the agent’s car and boxing him in with her own vehicle.
She was indicted on federal charges of impeding a federal officer, but the U.S. attorney’s office dropped the charges after evidence was released in court that the Border Patrol agent, Charles Exum, had driven his vehicle back to his base in Maine, and boasted about the shooting in text messages.
Martinez’s lawyer Christopher Parente has said bodycam footage from a Border Patrol agent recorded during the incident shows the driver of the Border Patrol vehicle turning the steering wheel to the left, toward Martinez’s vehicle. After the vehicles made contact, the agents stepped out and one of them fired at Martinez.
After the fatal shootings in Minnesota of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration agents last month, Martinez asked the court to release the footage and additional evidence in her case.
Martinez, who was in court on Friday, testified at a public forum organized by congressional Democrats in Washington earlier this week that she was grateful that she had survived the “attempted murder.”
(Reporting by Renee Hickman, Editing by Emily Schmall and Franklin Paul)
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