Theme: state violence — full compilation

Federal agents shot Marimar Martinez, a US citizen in Chicago, multiple times in October 2025. In the immediate aftermath, the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem described the shooting as a response to Martinez “ramming” agents’ vehicles in a “boxed-in” group of ten cars, brandishing a gun, and “forcing” the agent to open fire. Martinez, the official account said, “drove herself to the hospital.”

Each element of that account began to fail under examination. The federal charging document discussed two cars, not ten, made no reference to a gun, and noted that an ambulance — not Martinez — transported her to the hospital. Body camera footage, according to her counsel, undermines the claim that her vehicle was driven toward the agents and captures one of the officers saying “do something, bitch” immediately before opening fire.

Senator Chris Murphy responded with an unusual letter to Secretary Noem, demanding a public correction of the administration’s false statements about the shooting. The intervention is unusual because the underlying conditions are unusual: oversight mechanisms typically applied to federal agents have so atrophied that an individual member of Congress writing a public correction letter is something close to an outer accountability boundary.

On October 9, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a temporary restraining order against federal agents operating under Operation Midway Blitz in Illinois, restricting their use of tear gas, pepper spray, and other “riot control weapons” against protesters and journalists, and barring them from clearing people from public spaces those people had a lawful right to occupy. A subsequent court filing alleges that the order has been violated “almost every day” since it was issued. On October 25, federal agents reportedly deployed tear gas in Chicago’s Old Irving Park as children walked to a Halloween parade at their school. From the bench, on Tuesday, Judge Ellis said: “I can only imagine how terrified they were.”

When the judge asked Customs and Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino to produce all use-of-force reports from agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz since September 2, Bovino said it would be impossible because of “the sheer amount.” The court ordered the reports and accompanying body-camera footage produced by the end of the week. The volume of force itself — too large to assemble — is a piece of evidence that did not exist, in that quantifiable form, before the question was put.

On September 12, two Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stopped Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a thirty-eight-year-old Mexican immigrant, on a busy street in Franklin Park, Illinois, less than a minute after he had dropped off his two sons at an elementary school and a day care. Less than a minute after the stop, Villegas-Gonzalez was shot in the neck and his Subaru had crashed into a truck more than a hundred feet down the road. The Department of Homeland Security said he had hit and dragged one of the officers with his car, “seriously injuring” him; the officer had fired in self-defense. Villegas-Gonzalez was unarmed and had no criminal record beyond traffic offenses.

A New York Times reconstruction, drawing on multiple surveillance feeds, the officers’ body cameras, and bystander video, calls two specific elements of that account into question: the recordings do not show Villegas-Gonzalez striking either officer with the vehicle, and on his own body camera in the immediate aftermath one of the officers describes his injuries as “nothing major.” The reconstruction does not resolve every question about the encounter; it does demonstrate, frame by frame, that the official narrative — a self-defense killing of a man who had seriously injured a federal officer — is not supported by the recordings the federal officers themselves made.

Armed federal immigration agents in California stopped a vehicle, arrested its driver — a U.S. citizen — and prepared to drive off with the man’s car, in keeping with a routine in which a vehicle is left disabled in the road or impounded after a stop. Inside that vehicle, in a child seat, was the man’s toddler. A crowd of bystanders that had assembled at the scene refused to allow the agents to leave with the child still in the car. After the crowd’s intervention, the agents agreed to wait for the family to arrive and collect the toddler.

That the toddler was eventually retrieved is an outcome that depended on the crowd. The default trajectory — the procedural plan the agents began to execute before they were stopped — would have separated the child from any adult relative for at least the duration of the agents’ transport of the vehicle. The question of what protocol governs the disposition of children present at federal arrests is one the article suggests has no public answer; the operational answer, on this day, was the bystanders.

Yaa’kub Ira Vijandre, a photojournalist from Arlington, Texas, and a DACA recipient, was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at gunpoint, where he has remained. The basis of the federal case against him, on the documents, is his pattern of social-media activity: Instagram posts and the act of “liking” content expressing support for Palestine and for U.S. citizens whom Vijandre considered wrongfully convicted.

A new filing in Vijandre’s case asserts that he was offered the option of becoming an informant in exchange for his release and refused. The filing characterizes Vijandre as a political prisoner — held not for an act, but for the protected expression of an opinion the Department of Homeland Security disfavors.

Masked federal agents wearing ICE vests cordoned off a Minneapolis residential construction site, refused to identify themselves or present a warrant, and trapped two construction workers on the roof for hours in subzero temperatures. A protest crowd gathered. Bystanders carried heating pads, a jacket, and food; the agents prevented them from reaching the men on the roof.

A reporter at the scene counted at least thirty federal agents who took rotating shifts retreating to vehicles to stay warm — a temperature accommodation extended to the masked agents but not to the men they had cornered above. The agents eventually left; an ambulance removed one of the men from the roof.

The episode is at least the third documented case of federal immigration agents besieging construction workers on private residential job sites; comparable incidents had occurred in Chicago in October and outside New Orleans earlier in the year.

Federal immigration agents deployed multiple canisters of tear gas on a Minneapolis crowd that included children participating in a march. The canisters shattered the window of a nearby low-income apartment occupied by a disabled veteran, who was tear-gassed inside his own home.

Witness accounts from the scene describe at least six tear-gas canisters and four to six flashbang explosions used against an unarmed crowd, and a rotating shift of federal agents retreating to vehicles to warm up between deployments. Bystanders carried water bottles, saline, and eye wash; the crowd was, by the witness’s specific phrasing, “prepared to help one another.”

The only passenger in the car when an ICE officer shot and killed a United States citizen in Texas in 2025 was Joshua Orta. Orta had planned to speak publicly and contradict the government’s official account of the shooting. He died in an unrelated car crash before he could do so.

The word “unrelated” is doing all the work in the sentence above, and the only thing the public has to support it is the absence of contradicting evidence. In a case where the contested fact is the killing of a United States citizen by a federal officer, the absence of contradicting evidence is no longer a neutral state.

Aliya Rahman, the Minnesotan who was violently dragged out of her car by federal agents in January, was arrested again at the State of the Union address. The stated reason was that Rahman had “silently” challenged the president during the speech.

Silence, in legal terms, is the most protected form of expression. The arrest test was therefore not whether Rahman had spoken, disrupted, or violated any specific rule, but whether her presence and bearing were tolerable to the official mood of the room.

Body camera footage of an October 2025 incident in Chicago’s East Side neighborhood shows three named Border Patrol agents continuing an eighteen-minute high-speed vehicle pursuit after their supervisor ordered them to call it off. The chase ended when the agents’ own vehicle blew a tire and crashed. The agents then deployed tear gas in the surrounding residential neighborhood.

The Department of Homeland Security’s official account had described the crash as the result of agents intentionally striking the fleeing vehicle to stop it. The footage reveals neither the deliberate strike nor the intentional choice, but instead a tire failure following a chase that should have ended several minutes earlier.

Three agents are named in the reviews. Whether the gap between the official account and the visual record will produce any consequence for those agents is, as of this writing, unresolved.

On the first day of the war with Iran, a US ballistic missile previously unused in combat struck a sports hall, an elementary school, and residential buildings, killing at least twenty-one people including children. None of the targets were military by any conventional definition.

Forensic reconstruction — debris analysis, satellite imagery, civilian witness accounts — placed the strikes in the war’s first hours, when targeting decisions are still being calibrated against doctrine and intelligence is at its least mature. The choice to use an untested weapon in this window compounds the question of whether the targeting was deliberate, mistaken, or indifferent.

Whatever the answer, the dead are dead. The Pentagon has not, as of this writing, published a strike assessment that addresses the civilian harm.

The crew of the Ecuadorian fishing vessel Don Maca were finishing a day of swordfish and albacore lines when a drone strike tore through the boat, shattering glass and injuring several. The crew were subsequently detained by US forces and questioned. The United States has produced no evidence connecting the crew or the vessel to drug trafficking.

The strike is part of what the second Trump administration has framed as a “war on narcoterrorists” — a phrase that operates as a label rather than a definition, and one the administration has not been required to substantiate before each operation. Legal experts and human rights organizations have characterized the resulting attacks, which have killed Ecuadorian, Venezuelan, and Colombian civilians at sea, as extrajudicial killings.

The Don Maca was not the first such vessel attacked, nor has the United States said how many crews remain unaccounted for from prior strikes. The survivors’ testimony exists because this strike did not finish them.