Federal Courts and Prosecutions

Federal prosecutors say 25-year-old Brazilian national Luis Peterson Rohr Ferreira Borges pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Hartford to assaulting federal officers after a June 25, 2025 ICE arrest on Zion Street. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, once in a government vehicle Ferreira Borges kicked, flailed and threatened to kick the driver in the neck, then bit one Enforcement and Removal Operations officer and spat on the officer driving as they transported him to the federal building on Main Street. DHS had previously issued a 2023 civil immigration warrant for him, and he also faced earlier state charges in Connecticut including assault on public-safety personnel and intimidation based on bigotry or bias. He has been in custody since his 2025 arrest and faces up to one year in prison when he is sentenced on April 16. The case will likely be cited inside the broader fight over ICE tactics and resistance to immigration arrests, but it also underscores that some encounters do involve genuine assaults on officers, something Fox and administration allies have been emphasizing in their narrative about rising attacks on federal agents.

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.