Days before the federal government falsely claimed cellphone-brandishing nurse Alex Pretti was a terrorist plotting a “massacre,” a jury in Chicago acquitted Juan Espinoza Martinez on bogus charges of a murder-for-hire plot against then-Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino. A recently unsealed court transcript shows the government used that case to bolster its claims about the dangers of “doxing” Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. That pretext was used to convince a judge to obscure an ICE agent’s face during a public court proceeding when his name, face, employment, and location were publicly listed on his LinkedIn page.
As with its baseless claims about Pretti, the government presented no evidence supporting its proclamations that Martinez, a union carpenter, was a higher-up in the Latin Kings gang with the ability or intent to put out hits on Bovino or other immigration agents. The case against him hinged on ambiguous Snapchat messages that Martinez’s attorney called “neighborhood gossip.” But the Department of Homeland Security brought its allegations to the public long before it could be tested in court, repeating claims of bounties up to $50,000.
The transcript from a federal court in Chicago, which was recently released pursuant to a motion filed by law firm Mandell PC on behalf of local media outlets, shows how far the hysteria has gone. During an October 20, 2025, hearing in a case challenging immigration enforcement tactics, government lawyers asked for a private conference with Judge Sara Ellis to request the courtroom sketch artist not draw ICE Deputy Field Office Director Shawn Byers.
Government attorneys claimed that, in light of the alleged “bounties” on the heads of ICE agents, Byers had taken extensive precautions to disconnect his identity from his image online to protect himself. When the judge asked for details on the bounties, Department of Justice attorney Samuel Holt responded, “I don’t have all the details. My understanding is that I — I think it was a gang bounty.”
The judge cleared the courtroom and called Byers in to provide the details about the “threat.” Byers first claimed there was a $50,000 “bounty issued by the cartels on me,” along with $10,000 “for all my family members.” He also said the “credible threat” was out against “all senior ICE officials here in Chicago,” where Byers said he was the most senior ICE agent on the ground. Asked when he learned about the bounty, Byer said “It’s been about a week or so I believe.” Martinez’s arrest was announced two weeks earlier, on October 6; no other bounties were publicly reported in the interim. When the judge asked whether these threats were “directed specifically” at him, Byers seemed to walk his claims back, replying, “Well, all senior ICE officials. So it’s not just me.”
Byers also said he’d taken action to “limit social media exposure” and “reduce the footprint” to avoid his face being connected with his name and that even his appearance in court required “additional precautions.”
“You know, my name is out there. I’ve been doxed as — as recently as over the weekend,” Byers told the judge, according to the court transcript. “So my name is out there, but my name has not been connected to my face yet, so that’s what I’m trying to prevent from happening.”
Despite objections from opposing counsel that court proceedings (and courtroom sketches) should be public, the judge ordered the sketch artist to blur Byers’s facial features, concealing his identity. Ellis’s compromise, while likely intended as a good-faith effort to balance safety and transparency, nonetheless validated the notion that immigration agents operate under extreme risk, justifying extraordinary protective measures by our legal system. It also effectively brought the masks immigration agents wear on the street into the courtroom.
The judge’s compromise validated the notion that immigration agents operate under extreme risk, justifying extraordinary protective measures by our legal system.
Then, while Byers and other witnesses testified, someone apparently Googled his name and informed the judge that a simple search turned up his LinkedIn profile, complete with his photo, his exact job title, and his location in Chicago.
The judge called the parties back into closed session (it’s unclear why, given that the false reason for the earlier private sidebar had been exposed).
“I got to say, you know, I feel slightly foolish in trying to protect Mr. Byers when, you know, a simple Google search pulls up his name and his picture,” she said, according to the transcript. She also encouraged the attorney to advise the ICE deputy director that his name and photograph were readily available online. “If I could find his picture in two seconds with his name, it just looks a little silly to be asking the courtroom sketch artist to blur his features.” Being recognized is “the cost of being a public servant,” she continued.
The judge also said moving forward, she would “just be more hesitant to kind of obscure somebody’s identity,” but did not say she’d be entering any actual sanctions for the half-baked rationale used to convince her to censor the public record.
After some back and forth with the DOJ attorneys about whether Byers’s LinkedIn profile contained his actual picture, Ellis confirmed the profile for “Shawn B.” did when viewed by someone logged into LinkedIn. (A LinkedIn search for “Shawn Byers ICE” brings up just one profile for a Shawn B., who is listed as currently working as Deputy Field Office Director for ICE in Chicago. It also notes he is a 22-year veteran of the department and contains reposts about ICE removals in Chicago and a hiring notice for GEO Group, the for-profit prison conglomerate contracted with ICE, but no longer contains any profile picture.)
Since Byers’s manufactured emergency obviously wasn’t based on real concerns for his safety, what was the point of the whole sideshow? It was likely intended to feed the narrative that immigration agents face such grave threats that identifying them — in addition to filming their operations, following them to do so, tracking and communicating about their locations and other clearly constitutionally protected conduct — needs to be restrained. It’s the same fiction that primes segments of the American public to be receptive to claims that people like Pretti and Renee Good were threatening officers’ lives to justify their killings.
In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem scolded CBS News’ “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan for naming Jonathan Ross, the immigration agent who shot and killed Good in Minneapolis. She accused Brennan of “continu[ing] to dox law enforcement,” despite acknowledging that Ross’s name was already very public, citing unspecified attacks against his family. It’s far from the first time Noem and others have claimed that naming or videotaping law enforcement officers is improper, illegal, or even intended to foment violence.
These efforts to chill the work of reporters and ICE watchers have spread beyond immigration enforcement, as we saw from last month’s subpoena by the House Oversight Committee of journalist Seth Harp, which was accompanied by a criminal referral to the Department of Justice by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida. Harp was also accused of “doxing” for naming a Delta Force commander involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, an allegation backed up by unsubstantiated claims that the commander’s life was at risk.
The Byers ordeal is an unusually clear example of the current playbook being used to shield administration officials and their foot soldiers from accountability under the guise of protecting public officials’ safety.
The notion that naming public officials at the center of major news stories, who very often conceal their identities while carrying out unprecedented law enforcement operations on the streets of our cities, or that simply drawing their faces for the court record is “doxing” or otherwise improper, is a complete Trump administration fabrication. Still, the government is repeating it often enough that it’s warping the public’s perception of journalism. The Byers ordeal is an unusually clear example of the current playbook being used to shield administration officials and their foot soldiers from accountability under the guise of protecting public officials’ safety.
The next time this happens in court, the judge needs to demand specifics, with evidence, about whatever nebulous alleged plots or threats the government is pushing to justify secrecy. With comprehensive studies demonstrating their constant misrepresentations, nothing government lawyers say can be taken at face value. And when it happens outside the courthouse, the media needs to be similarly skeptical and not take the “threats” narrative at face value from an administration with a long, proven track record of misleading the public for its own political ends.
Judges also need to impose significant sanctions on lawyers and witnesses who mislead them, make them pawns in the administration’s anti-transparency objectives, and waste their time. Gently reprimanding them in private doesn’t cut it, especially when these false, alarmist narratives used in court are then being used to justify ICE killings to the public.
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