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Woman Shot by Border Patrol Says Agent Appeared to Take “Trophy” Photo
A federal agent used his cell phone to take a picture of Marimar Martinez after she was shot five times by Border Patrol in Chicago—a chilling image that haunts her to this day.Martinez testified in Congress Tuesday about how she was shot after she followed an agent’s car in Chicago while trying to warn her neighbors. DHS initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” She was charged with felony assault of a federal officer despite ending up in the hospital herself.In her testimony, Martinez revealed a new detail about what happened after she was shot.“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave. I told him I did not consent … but he did not care. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”Marimar Martinez: I was escorted out through the back in a https://t.co/HBG9JTEKDG of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for… pic.twitter.com/dloJrYmqc8— Acyn (@Acyn) February 3, 2026Why did a federal agent keep coming into Martinez’s room while she lay in her hospital bed? And why did he have to take her picture if she had already been arrested, if not to keep a “trophy” for himself as Martinez suggested? Recall that Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, bragged in text messages afterward, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”While ICE has reportedly been scanning protesters’ faces, this instance feels much more personal.
Renee Good’s Brothers Mourn That Her Death Has Not Stopped ICE Terror
Renee Good’s brother hoped her senseless killing at the hands of a federal agent would have brought an end to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown. Instead, he hasn’t seen any change.Addressing a public congressional meeting Tuesday to examine the violent tactics of Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement agents, Luke Ganger spoke about his sister, who was the first U.S. citizen to be shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last month. “In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country, and it has not,” he said. “The completely surreal scenes taking place on the streets of Minneapolis are beyond explanation. This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents. These encounters with federal agents are changing the community, and changing many lives, including ours, forever,” he said. “I still don’t know how to explain to my four-year-old what these agents are doing when we pass by.”Ganger said his four-year-old daughter “knows that her aunt died and that somebody caused it to happen.”“She told me that there are no bad people and that everyone makes mistakes. She has Nee’s spirit,” he said. His sister, he said, “carried peace, patience, and love for others wherever she went.”“Our family is a very American blend,” Ganger continued. “We vote differently, and we rarely completely agree on the finer details of what it means to be a citizen of this country. We attend various churches, and some not at all. And despite those differences, we have always treated each other with love and respect. And we’ve gotten even closer during this very divided time in our country. And we hope that our family can be even a small example to others not to let political ideals divide us, to be good like Renee.“But the most important thing we can do today is to help this panel and our country understand who Nee is, and what a beautiful American we have lost. A sister, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and a friend.”Ganger’s call for unity bears repeating. Not a single Republican congressperson—the very same people who want you to believe that Good deserved to die—bothered to attend Tuesday’s forum. Also testifying were Brent Ganger, another brother of Good; Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.
Not a Single Republican Shows Up to Hear Renee Good’s Brothers Testify
Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family. Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.This story has been updated.
Trump’s New Deportation Chief Is a “F*cking Dope,” Ex-Colleagues Say
The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task. Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast. Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast. “Such a fucking dope,” another person said. “Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast. Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office. Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.
Minnesota Prosecutors Quit En Masse Thanks to Pam Bondi’s Orders
The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office is seeing a wave of resignations following the Department of Justice’s handling of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.Eight lawyers are either leaving or have announced their intentions to quit the office, following six other resignations last month. The high turnover is unprecedented, as the office generally doesn’t even have that many resignations in an entire year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. Now there are fewer than 20 attorneys in the office to handle the state’s federal cases.“More often than not, the people who come in don’t quit, they stay,” Tom Heffelfinger, who served as a U.S. attorney for Minnesota under two Republican presidents, told the Star-Tribune. “A lot of those [assistant U.S. attorneys] see these as career jobs. This is what they want to do. If they can get the job, they stay there.”After ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Good last month in Minneapolis, the DOJ refused to initiate a civil rights investigation into her death and instead opted to investigate her wife over her activism. This prompted six attorneys in the office to resign in January.The more recent resignations reportedly came after a meeting of the office’s criminal division with Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. One attorney asked Rosen why local law enforcement was shut out of the DOJ investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti. Others asked why cases involving the alleged assault of federal officers didn’t examine officer conduct. Rosen replied that he wasn’t asking staff “to do anything illegal,” according to one staffer.One of the departures is the civil division chief, Ana Voss, who was in charge of handling the hundreds of wrongful detention petitions filed as a result of ICE’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Voss wrote in a recent legal brief that she couldn’t “effectively triage and review” every judicial order. Other employees besides the attorneys have also resigned from the office, including a victim witness coordinator and an evidence technician.The DOJ has scrambled to bring 10 attorneys from other states—five from Washington, D.C., and five from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the United States Armed Forces—to try and fill the gaps. But the office is still “woefully understaffed,” according to one former U.S. attorney. Lawyers have their hands full, with 490 immigrants challenging their detention from December 1 to January 26, compared to 375 similar cases in the previous eight years combined.“They’re in disarray,” said Doug Kelly, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in the 1980s. “I think it’s just demoralizing to the folks who are there.”
NIH Chief Breaks With RFK Jr. on Key Question From Bernie Sanders
The health secretary is at odds with his own agency.The director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday to discuss efforts to modernize the public health sector.But his appearance spilled a deeper truth when ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that Bhattacharya clarify his position on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deeply held belief that vaccines are linked to autism.“Do you think that deep distrust … has something to do—when you have an organization like the American Medical Association telling us that vaccines do not cause autism, but you have a secretary of HHS who says the very opposite? Do you think that causes concern and mistrust among parents?” asked Sanders.“In 2024 there was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that only about 40 percent of patients still trust their doctors,” Bhattacharya said, noting the study was published before Kennedy’s appointment. “As someone who went to medical school myself, that’s absolutely shocking.”“Let me ask you a simple question.… Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?” pressed Sanders.“I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism,” replied Bhattacharya.“Nah. Uh uh. I didn’t ask measles,” insisted Sanders. “Do vaccines cause autism?”“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.Combating autism supposedly caused by vaccines is the cornerstone of Kennedy’s public health policy. Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab. The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. And just last month, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.
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