Back in October, DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem claimed on Fox News there was an organized effort to target DHS law enforcement agents:
So our intelligence indicates that these people are organized. They’re getting more and more people on their team as far as attacking officers, and they’re making plans to ambush them and to kill them. We have specific officers and agents that have bounties that have been put out on their heads. It’s been $2000 to kidnap them, $10,000 to kill them. They’ve released their pictures, they’ve sent them between their networks. And it’s an extremely dangerous situation and unprecedented. So we’ve put protective detail around those individuals, changed some of our operations to keep our officers safe.
Border Patrol hype guy Gregory Bovino followed up the next day, also on Fox News, saying:
it’s a war zone out there. Secretary Noem mentioned a bounty on the heads of federal agents that $2000 to kidnap, $10,000 to kill senior Border Patrol officials and senior ICE officials here in Chicago.
As we covered at the time, a press release from DHS made this seem like less than was being claimed in those Fox News appearance. As the whole thing amounted to a Snapchat message about Gregory Bovino. Three months later, in court the story has been further reduced. The press release was titled, “Latin Kings Gang Member Arrested in Illinois After Placing Hit on Commander at Large Border Patrol Chief Bovino.” Jon Seidel of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that federal prosecutors are no longer claiming that man who sent the Snapchat message was a ranking member of the Latin Kings gang. Only that he had an “affinity” for the gang. The claim that he was ranking member of the gang came from an anonymous source:
The criminal complaint originally filed against Espinoza Martinez in October cited an anonymous“source of information,” who accused Espinoza Martinez of being a “ranking member of the Latin Kings.”
What comes across is that this was someone try to impress an anonymous informant in ways that don’t seem all that believable. For example, prosecutors say he wrote text messages that read “Chapo has our back bro. if they they take one its gunna be bad,” and “sinaloa dont f— around.” Chapo like being a reference to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán who was the head of the Sinola cartel. He has been in US custody since 2017. And has been in the federal Florence supermax prison in Colorado since 2019.
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