Like other young women she knew who lived on the South Side of Chicago, Marimar Martinez carried a handgun at the bottom of her purse. The gun, a Smith & Wesson pistol for which she had a concealed-carry license, was usually strapped into a neon-pink harness. “It’s a girl gun,” she told me recently. Martinez is thirty-one and works as a teaching assistant at a Montessori school. She thought of herself as a trusting person who’d help “literally anybody,” even strangers. But in 2020, after her sister was the victim of an attempted carjacking, she decided that a gun would be a good idea. The man at the gun shop looked at Martinez, a small woman with round eyes and rosy cheeks, and recommended the pistol, which fit nicely in her hands. She liked to take the gun with her on runs in the forest preserve, where the trails could be lonely. She had never fired the gun outside of a shooting range. But she liked knowing that it was there at the bottom of her bag, for her protection.That’s where the gun was on Saturday, October 4, 2025. Martinez woke up to a warm, sunlit morning. She filled a wading pool in the yard for her two dogs, Pancho and Gordo, then sorted through old clothes and shoes to donate to a nearby church. She loaded them in the back of her Nissan Rogue and put her purse on the seat beside her. She was almost at the church when she noticed a silver Chevy Tahoe in the road ahead of her. “I was just, like, Something’s not right,” she said. “I know it’s them.”President Donald Trump had recently begun deploying immigration officers to cities across the country. Four weeks earlier, agents had arrived in Chicago with military fatigues, face masks, armored vehicles, and rifles. Helicopters and drones whirred overhead. The Department of Homeland Security declared this Operation Midway Blitz. It was among the first of several campaigns targeting, the government said, criminals living in the country illegally—though, according to available data, most of the people arrested had no criminal history. Soon, protesters began following agents, recording them, and, at points, attempted to block the entrance of an ICE facility. Agents responded with force, using tear gas and rubber bullets.Martinez, a U.S. citizen who came from a family of Mexican immigrants, had not attended the protests in Chicago. But she had been following ICE’s activity in the city, mostly through dedicated Facebook pages. She knew that agents took measures to disguise their vehicles. So when she saw the Tahoe, which had tinted back windows, a Kentucky license plate, and a light-up Uber decal on the front windshield, she decided to follow it. “La migra! La migra!” she shouted out her window, using slang for ICE. She honked her horn repeatedly. At one point, she began to record a Facebook live stream in which you can hear her yelling, her manicured almond nails wrapped around the steering wheel.Charles Exum, a Border Patrol agent of more than twenty years, was driving the Tahoe, with two agents in the back seat. He could hear Martinez shouting, and, when he looked in his mirror, saw a pink phone raised at his vehicle. Exum had a tan overshirt on and, he said later in federal court, in an effort to blend in he had taken off his tactical vest and its attached body camera. A pack of Marlboro Lights rested on the center console. Exum later told the F.B.I. that Martinez had been following him for ten to fifteen minutes, and was “inches from my bumper.” Another civilian vehicle, a black GMC Envoy, was nearby. By the time one of the agents in the back of the Tahoe turned on his body camera, at 10:26 A.M., they appeared to be bracing for confrontation. One was trying to call 911, though no one seemed to answer. Both agents in the back seat held guns in their hands. One already had his finger on the trigger. Multiple cars were honking as the Tahoe headed north on Kedzie Avenue. “Do something, bitch,” an agent said. Another said, “It’s time to get aggressive and get the fuck out, ’cuz they’re trying to box us in.”“Watch out.”“If she hits us . . .”Body-camera footage from an agent in the back seat of the Tahoe. Source U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of Illinois Martinez has said she was not trying to hit anyone. She wanted to follow the agents, alerting people to their presence, until they eventually left the neighborhood. But, inside the Tahoe, the agents felt the situation was escalating. “We’re gonna make contact, and we’re boxed in,” one said. Video footage from a nearby security camera shows open road in front of the Tahoe, though agents later said that they felt hemmed in by the Rogue and by the black GMC. A moment later, the sides of the Rogue and the Tahoe collided. The body-camera footage shows Exum yanking the wheel left, toward the Rogue, then right. Responsibility for the collision is contested. Exum says Martinez hit him first, before he turned into the Rogue. Martinez says he hit her, and that the body-camera footage proves it. But there is no video showing exactly what took place. Seconds later, Exum stopped his car ahead of Martinez. He opened the driver’s side door with his left hand, a pistol in his right.The view from a nearby security camera. Source Cheronis & Parente LLC Martinez saw him raise his gun. Afraid for her life, she said, she hunched her head between her shoulders, her hands on the wheel, and tried to drive away to safety. Exum shouted, “Get down!” He later said that he wasn’t sure why he said this, but that he believed that Martinez was trying to hit him with her car. At 10:29 A.M., he fired at Martinez five times.She was hit once in her right arm, once in the chest, and three times in the legs. At first, she thought she’d been hit with pepper balls or rubber bullets. Then she saw how much blood there was. She kept driving, holding the wheel with her injured arm and applying pressure to her wounds with the other hand. At 10:30 A.M., she called 911. “Please!” she said, groaning. She turned into a truck stop, parked, and tried to walk inside, holding her phone. She thought of the Western movies she had seen with her father, where characters tied off their wounds to stop the bleeding. “Do you have a bandanna?” she asked the men working inside.“Hello, ma’am?” the 911 dispatcher asked on the phone. “Do you know who shot you?”“Oh, my God, I feel like I’m going to faint,” she said.The dispatcher asked about the shooter six more times. Eventually, Martinez yelled into the phone, “ICE agent shot me!” She sat down in the store, putting her head against the wall and whimpering into the phone. She watched the light outside get brighter. Eventually, she passed out.When federal law-enforcement officers arrived to search the Rogue, which was covered in blood, they found the gun in its pink holster in her purse. It didn’t matter that she had never touched it. The gun soon became part of a surreal composite image of Martinez presented by the Trump Administration as fact. Within hours, D.H.S. described her as armed and dangerous, a “domestic terrorist.” Tricia McLaughlin, a D.H.S. spokesperson, wrote on social media that Martinez had “rammed” agents with her car while “armed with a semi-automatic weapon.” The statement about the gun was technically true—most modern pistols are—but misleading. McLaughlin also said that Martinez had recently written a post on social media saying, “Hey to all my gang let’s fuck those mother fuckers up, don’t let them take anyone.” But Martinez had never posted this; the quote, it turned out, came from another person’s Facebook account. Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., shared a video of a black S.U.V. aggressively ramming an agent’s truck, attributing the act to Martinez. But the S.U.V. wasn’t her car, and the video was from an unrelated incident. These posts remain online.Martinez was charged with assaulting, impeding, and interfering with a federal law-enforcement officer. She faced twenty years in prison. By the time she woke up at a hospital, hours later, the government’s version of the story had already spread. She saw federal officers in her room, and feared that one of them was the man who had just shot her. She asked a nurse if she could keep them away, but the nurse said that there was nothing she could do. “Sorry,” Martinez remembered her saying. “You should have never rammed them.”One reason we know so much about this case is that Martinez recently lobbied a judge to unseal the evidence. She had watched, in the months following her own shooting, as federal agents shot three people in Minneapolis, all of whom were then blamed for inciting the violence. Two of the victims were dead. “I was there in their shoes, and I have a voice,” Martinez said. “Something that they don’t have.” The evidence includes body-camera footage, F.B.I. reports, interview summaries, and dozens of text messages. Together, the material gives us the most complete picture yet of a D.H.S. shooting and its aftermath. Martinez’s lawyer, Christopher Parente, believes that her case should be studied as a “playbook” for D.H.S. violence. “She’s one of the few people who has survived the bullets and can speak out,” he told me.Last year, the Trump Administration began pushing ICE to start making three thousand arrests a day. In service of that goal, agents have spent the last nine months roving unfamiliar cities—New Orleans, Charlotte, Minneapolis—wearing face masks and conducting raids. Fear alone has been enough to make these operations dangerous. Last August, in Los Angeles County, when agents appeared near a Home Depot in Monrovia, a day laborer fled on foot into the freeway and was struck and killed by a car. The raids have also produced a string of outrages: a six-month-old baby exposed to tear gas; a pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball; a man dragged outside in sub-freezing temperatures, wearing only his underwear, after being mistaken for a sex offender. With every new shock, the animus between protesters and agents has grown worse. Last summer, Kristi Noem, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that D.H.S. considers “violence” against agents to be anything that threatens their safety, including “videotaping them.”Through interactions caught on video, the anger has trickled into public view. A masked agent, in one video, screams at a man in Minneapolis, “Stop fucking following us!” In another, a woman tells an agent, “I hope you have a terrible day.” There is a sense, watching some of the videos, that the agents feel hunted. In its press releases, D.H.S. repeatedly claims that assaults against agents have increased by more than a thousand per cent. (An NPR analysis of court records last fall found the increase of alleged assaults may be closer to twenty-five per cent.) The agency did not provide a full account of the incidents it has been tracking, but it did send a list of several examples, including photos of an officer’s finger that had been “bit off,” an officer with an open wound on the back of his head, and another missing a chunk of his upper lip. Protesters have thrown rocks, set off fireworks, and followed agents to their hotels. In response, D.H.S. leaders have reinforced agents’ sense of tribalism. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol leader who became the face of Trump’s immigration-enforcement operations until he was sidelined earlier this year, was captured on video giving a pep talk to a huddle of agents in Los Angeles. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders, all the way to the top,” Bovino had told the agents. “It’s all about us now. It ain’t about them.”“Whose city is it, chief?” an agent asked.Bovino replied, “This is our fucking city.”D.H.S. has raced to hire new, inexperienced agents, holding ICE career fairs and putting up Customs and Border Protection tables at rodeos and sporting expos. But even for longtime Border Patrol agents, who are trained at an academy in the deserts of New Mexico and stationed along the northern and southern borders, high-density cities are unfamiliar terrain. “They don't have experience working in an urban environment,” John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama Administration, told me. “You don’t have protesters out there watching you.” To send those agents into politically fraught urban environments—“well, it’s very dangerous,” he said.Over the past year, there have been at least seventeen D.H.S. shootings, four of them fatal. After many of them, Trump officials moved quickly to justify the shooting and accuse the victim of attacking agents, all before an investigation had taken place. In ten of the thirteen shootings where the victims survived, they faced felony charges. In five of those cases, the charges were either dropped or dismissed. Just a few days into Operation Midway Blitz, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican man with only traffic violations on his record. Afterward, D.H.S. said that González had driven his car at agents, hitting and dragging one of the officers “a significant distance” and leaving him “seriously injured.” Video from the scene later showed two agents on either side of González’s car as he began to reverse his vehicle. Neither agent appears to have been hit, though, in body camera footage, one says he was dragged “a little bit” and describes his injuries as “nothing major.” D.H.S. has not publicly amended its account of the shooting.In January, in Minneapolis, Renee Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother, was driving home from a school drop-off with her partner when she saw federal agents, and stopped in the street. An agent shot and killed her as she tried to drive away. Two hours later, D.H.S. issued a statement accusing her of trying to run the agent over, in an “act of domestic terrorism.” That afternoon, Trump also posted online that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Video later showed Good turning her wheel away from the agent who shot her. Two weeks later, Trump said that he had learned that Good’s father was a “tremendous Trump fan,” and noted that agents were going to “make mistakes.” But he left his earlier statements online.Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, a nurse, was on the south side of Minneapolis filming agents with his cellphone. A handgun, for which he had a permit, was holstered at his hip. Video showed that agents pushed him to his knees, disarmed him, and then shot him. But a few hours later, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who had tried to “assassinate” an officer. Pretti’s parents learned of their son’s death when an Associated Press reporter called them. “Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man,” they wrote in a statement. This appeal produced testimonials, pictures of Pretti with his mountain bike, and a video of Pretti eulogizing a veteran over his hospital bed. But it was hard to imagine any