Border Patrol Use of Force

An early‑morning shooting just after 7:30 a.m. Tuesday near milepost 15 on West Arivaca Road — about 25 miles from the U.S.–Mexico border and 20 miles from Arivaca — left one person critically wounded who was taken into custody, treated on scene by Santa Rita Fire District and American Medical Response crews, and airlifted to a regional level‑one trauma center. The FBI said it is investigating an alleged assault on a federal officer in connection with the shooting, and the Pima County Sheriff’s Office is working jointly with the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection; CBP and Border Patrol had not immediately commented.

A Venezuelan woman shot and wounded by a Border Patrol agent during a Jan. 8 immigration stop in a Portland, Oregon, medical-complex parking lot has pleaded guilty to illegally entering the United States and was sentenced to one year of probation. Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras appeared by video from ICE detention in Tacoma, Washington, and will be allowed to remain out of custody in Oregon under a negotiated deal that includes location monitoring and a nighttime curfew, along with a ban on being in areas where prostitution is occurring. The FBI has told the court it found no surveillance or other video of the shooting, in which the same agent also wounded driver Luis Nino-Moncada after he allegedly reversed a pickup repeatedly into an unoccupied Border Patrol rental car and struck the agent, who then fired two shots claiming fear for his life. Nino-Moncada has been indicted on federal charges of aggravated assault on a federal employee and damaging federal property and remains jailed pending a March jury trial, while Portland’s police chief and DHS say both he and Zambrano-Contreras entered the U.S. illegally in 2022–23 and have "some nexus" to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, though they were not suspects in an earlier gang shooting. The incident, coming one day after an ICE shooting death in Minneapolis, has fed protests over aggressive federal immigration tactics and the lack of video evidence in lethal and near-lethal encounters.