Marimar Martinez is suing the federal government for negligence, battery, assault, false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. She is a Chicago public school teacher. She was shot five times. The suit is overdue, not aggressive.
Here is the order of events. On October 4 of last year, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum fired into her vehicle in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood during ICE’s Operation Midway Blitz. The Department of Homeland Security’s immediate public posture was that Martinez was a “domestic terrorist” who had “ambushed” federal agents and rammed them with her car. Exum was placed on leave. That is the entire federal response to date.
Every piece of the government story has since collapsed. Federal prosecutors dropped the assault charges with prejudice, meaning the case is permanently dead. An Illinois Accountability Commission found that Exum had no justification for shooting her. Attorneys say the records contradict the government’s account at every turn. Her legal team — Chris Parente and Michael Gallagher — has now produced an independent crime-scene analysis showing that Exum shot her while her car was turning away from his, which means Exum lied about where he was standing, and his agency has known he lied. “It’s actual, concrete physical evidence and science led by an independent expert that shows the agent lied about where he was, and Marimar has been telling the truth,” Parente said. The government has not responded to that finding.
Five bullets into a teacher turning her car around, and the maximum personnel consequence is leave. No criminal charge against Exum. No public retraction. No correction of the press release. The DHS page calling Martinez a domestic terrorist is still online today, a year after the shooting and a year after the government’s own case fell apart. The Department of Homeland Security has had every opportunity, and every reason, to take that language down. It has chosen not to. That is a choice, and it is the choice this suit is now forcing into court.
Before I name anyone else’s share in this, I name mine. I sit in a parish in a country where a teacher was shot five times, and we heard about it and went on with the week. My church has been largely silent about the raids, the detentions, the operations with names like Midway Blitz. My readers — many of them people of faith — have read the headlines and returned to their days. That silence is not neutral. It is part of the machinery. The federal government cannot run an enforcement operation of this size in a country whose churches fill on Sunday without the country’s permission, and I have given mine, in the form of looking away. Heschel was right about this: few are guilty, but all are responsible.
The texts my tradition is built on are not ambiguous here. The Torah commands it more than thirty times: you shall not wrong the resident alien, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The stranger is not an abstraction in that law. The stranger is the congregation itself, remembered. Jesus says the same thing in the plainest language he has: I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me. A government that shoots a woman, calls her a terrorist, manufactures a story, watches the story collapse, and leaves the lie standing on its own website is not enforcing a border. It is refusing to see a person, and it is doing so with the country’s blessing. That is what the prophets named — not a policy disagreement, but the deliberate unseeing, and the healing of that wound lightly, calling it security when there is no security in it.
Charles Exum is a person. He has a name and a life that will outlast this story, and the accounting owed to him is owed in that register. But being placed on leave is not accountability. It is the institution protecting itself while leaving the man to carry the lie alone. If Exum wants the beginning of a way back, it begins with the truth about where he stood when he fired. An institutional repentance would look like this: the press release comes down, the department says plainly what its own commission has already found, and the man is treated as someone capable of telling the truth rather than as a liability to be managed. The apparatus that currently shields him is doing him no kindness. It is teaching him that the lie is the safer path, and then it will stand over his shoulder when the account comes due.
The reason Martinez is filing now, after initially planning to let the matter rest, is that the pattern is not stopping. She has watched more people die at the hands of federal agents — including in Minneapolis earlier this year — and watched the same machinery of accusation run again. The Department of Justice has now brought a rare charge against a separate ICE agent for lying about a shooting in Minnesota, which is the first crack in the wall. Martinez is suing so the crack becomes a hole.
“What’s happening is not normal,” Martinez said on Monday. She is right. She is not a terrorist. She is a teacher. She was shot. The agent lied. The agency is still lying. And the door back is not closed to anyone in this story — not to the agent, not to the department, not to the country that has watched all of it and kept its Sunday. The first step through it is the same one the crime-scene analysis already took: tell the truth about October 4. Then take the page down. Then answer the suit. What comes after that is the business of repair, and repair begins where the lie ends.