A Venezuelan man was accused of trying to murder an ICE officer. Then bystander video surfaced

By Ray Sanchez, CNN

(CNN) — Days after Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco was arrested by federal officers in Nebraska last summer, government officials branded the Venezuelan delivery driver with incendiary labels: “a criminal illegal alien,” “a known Tren de Aragua terrorist” and even alleged he slammed one agent’s head into the ground and choked her.

But that version of events, reported by some news outlets, began unraveling when bystander videos contradicted accounts painting the immigrant as a villain, the officers as victims.

Then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called Hurtado-Cariaco a “vicious Tren de Aragua gang member” in a June 2025 Justice Department statement.

“Violent attacks from terrorists against those who serve our communities will be met with swift and decisive justice,” Blanche said. The attorney general at the time, Pamela Bondi, weighed in, announcing a charge of attempted murder.

To his public defender, Hurtado-Cariaco’s case is yet another instance where video footage or other evidence largely undercuts the government’s account of immigration enforcement actions.

“It certainly seems like a pattern to me,” Federal Public Defender Richard McWilliams told CNN, referring to recent immigration arrests where DHS’ narratives were at odds with the evidence or undermined by video footage.

“If no one had recorded it, we’d be going to trial,” McWilliams said of his client’s arrest, underscoring just how crucial such documentation can be in high-stakes cases with pliable narratives.

Narrative travels ‘halfway around the world’

Hurtado-Cariaco, an asylum seeker paroled into the United States in 2024 after deserting the Venezuelan military, was indicted last summer on attempted murder and other charges, according to court documents.

The initial complaint, filed on the day he was apprehended, alleged Hurtado-Cariaco forcibly resisted arrest, according to a pre-sentencing court filing by McWilliams.

In an amended complaint a day later, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent wrote the defendant “violently threw himself” against the officer and caused her head to “smack harshly against the ground.” He later put the officer in a “chokehold” and continued to choke her “rather than simply flee the scene,” the complaint said.

Like in other cases before his, there would be no trial for Hurtado-Cariaco. He agreed to a plea bargain and threw himself at the mercy of the court for sentencing. He had no criminal record before his guilty plea, according to his attorney and court documents.

The difference in his case: the cellphone videos.

McWilliams, in the pre-sentencing filing, said HSI agents saw the videos via social media in mid-July, weeks after the arrest. The Nebraska US Attorney’s Office did not have those videos in hand at the time the initial charges were filed, spokesperson Amy Donato told CNN in an email. A federal agent, she said, obtained the videos after the indictment and turned them over to federal prosecutors.

“Once we reviewed the videos … the charges were appropriately downgraded to assault,” Donato said.

In November, four months after the videos emerged, federal prosecutors replaced the attempted murder count with what McWilliams called an “equally fantastic” charge of providing material support to a terrorist organization. Hurtado-Cariaco has denied any link to Tren de Aragua.

The terrorism charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. The US officially declared Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization in February 2025.

On July 2, after pleading guilty to a felony charge of forcibly resisting arrest causing bodily injury to a federal officer, Hurtado-Cariaco was sentenced to 14 months in prison, with the judge recommending he receive credit for time served.

Still, uncertainty looms over his fate.

“No one knows what will happen to Gabriel next,” McWilliams wrote in a pre-sentencing court filing. His client has an immigration detainer asking the Bureau of Prisons to transfer him directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, McWilliams told CNN.

“Before he could even appear before a judge, he was called … a ‘criminal illegal alien,’ a member of a prison gang, a terrorist, and violent killer. That message – pushed by the most powerful government on earth – traveled halfway around the world,” even reaching Hurtado-Cariaco’s mother in Venezuela, McWilliams said in the filing.

A pair of videos undermine official account

On the day he was arrested, Hurtado-Cariaco was driving on his way to register his car, according to his attorney.

What follows is an account of the events leading up to Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest based on the amended criminal complaint filed by DHS’ investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations.

A pair of masked agents from the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, stopped Hurtado-Cariaco in his car near his home in Bellevue, a suburb of Omaha.

The agents had an immigration-related warrant for Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest. When Hurtado-Cariaco got out of his car, he initially appeared to be compliant to their commands, the complaint states, before violently resisting – “twisting, fighting, and pushing” the female HSI agent, throwing himself against her and causing her head to hit the ground.

The agents struggled to detain him, the complaint said, and Hurtado-Cariaco placed the HSI agent in a chokehold when the two fell to the ground. When the FBI agent put Hurtado-Cariaco in a chokehold, he stopped choking the female officer but continued to “fight and resist” before breaking free and fleeing on foot, according to the complaint. He was later arrested without incident at his apartment, and the HSI agent was taken to the hospital, where she was admitted “due to concerns over a possibly broken elbow, concussion, and to check her vitals following the chokehold,” according to the complaint.

Those cellphone videos of the encounter, however, undermined that official account from DHS.

The footage was shot by Nathan Aragon, 20, who was in his car at the time, and his father, Victor, 60, who watched the encounter through the window of his home.

At Hurtado-Cariaco’s sentencing, Nathan Aragon testified that he started recording with his phone about five seconds after the altercation began.

In the video, the HSI agent has Hurtado-Cariaco in a brief chokehold before punching him as he resisted and tried to stand up. Moments later he stands up with the agents still holding onto him. When the three fall to the ground, the male agent climbs onto Hurtado-Cariaco and applies a chokehold, according to the 47-second video, which ends with the agents trying to put his arms behind his back.

In Victor Aragon’s 1 minute 48 second video, Hurtado-Cariaco and the agents are seen through a window wrestling on the ground. Nearly 40 seconds later, Hurtado-Cariaco slips out of his T-shirt, frees himself and runs shirtless for a few feet. The HSI agent is seen giving chase and grabbing the waistband of his pants before she tumbles hard to the ground. After Hurtado-Cariaco runs down the block, the agents get back into their vehicles.

Victor Aragon testified at the sentencing the HSI agent later returned to the scene with another officer.

“Did she seem in distress, physical distress of any kind?” McWilliams asked about the agent.

“No,” Victor Aragon said.

“She was moving perfectly fine. She wasn’t showing any signs of being injured, hurt … I saw her walking and moving around normal,” he added.

‘You cannot ignore the videos here’

On sentencing day in Omaha, US District Court Chief Judge Robert Rossiter – nominated by former President Barack Obama – said he had “no doubt” Hurtado-Cariaco was guilty of the felony charge: The defendant tried to avoid capture and flee, struggled with federal officers and injured one of them.

The judge said the sentencing was “out of the ordinary” and didn’t mince words when it came to the government’s shifting stories about the June 18, 2025, arrest.

“What happened here was, at worst, a misrepresentation – I’m not going to use the word ‘lie’ – and at best, complete negligence (in reporting),” he said, dismissing DHS’s official reports as “embellished.”

“They do not fit any of the allegations. The allegation of the choke hold by this defendant on the victim officers is not established by any of the evidence,” the judge said. “Those allegations, those representations, to the U.S. Attorney, to others, led to much more serious charges, attempted murder, to start with … and it shouldn’t have taken the videos to come out to get there.”

The “misrepresentation” of facts – “or if you want to call it sloppiness, cannot happen,” he added. “But you cannot ignore the videos here.”

“I’m not expressing an opinion on this defendant’s gang affiliation or lack of gang affiliation, but to refer to him as a terrorist, attempted murderer, that he had put a choke hold on these victims, it’s just not borne out by the evidence and it’s troubling,” Rossiter said.

The only chokeholds seen in the videos were inflicted by the federal officers themselves, Rossiter said. “We have to be able to trust law enforcement,” he added, voicing concern about the reliability of official reports.

‘Fabricate a detailed, definitive, and unqualified story’

The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond directly to questions about the handling of Hurtado-Cariaco’s case or remarks made by the federal judge and public defender.

In an email, a DHS spokesperson repeated official statements made shortly after Hurtado-Cariaco’s arrest last summer, calling him a known gang member and terrorist who “threw the ICE agent to the ground, slammed her head into the pavement, ripped off her body armor, and made repeated and physical violent contact.”

McWilliams, the defense attorney, told CNN the speed and scale of the escalation surrounding what happened was troubling. A complaint that was initially relatively close to the facts was rapidly rewritten into something much more inflammatory, and within days the incident was being amplified by top officials at DHS and DOJ through increasingly embellished narratives.

“I don’t see any other way to frame what happened which was that they lied about him,” the federal public defender said at the sentencing.

“Sometime between the arrest and the drafting of the amended complaint, there was a decision made by somebody to fabricate a detailed, definitive, and unqualified story about this arrest, period,” he added.

During sentencing, Assistant US Attorney Don Kleine disagreed with McWilliams’ claim that the agents lied about what happened.

“This was a heat of the moment situation and there was a misperception of what occurred,” Kleine told the court.

McWilliams was firm. The affidavit in the case was prepared by HSI Special Agent Craig Allrich, who did not witness the incident. The agents, who were not named publicly, “felt comfortable” altering the story “because there was no body-worn camera footage, there were no visible bystanders,” he told the court. “It shouldn’t depend upon people getting their phones out to depend upon the reliability of this process.”

“If the reporting agent didn’t see it, he shouldn’t report it. And if he’s going to rely on others to give him the information, they should be giving him different information. They shouldn’t embellish and certainly shouldn’t embellish in order to – at the behest of higher-ups,” the judge said.

CNN reached out to Allrich, through DHS, for comment.

Recent cases crumble under weight of scrutiny

Hurtado-Cariaco’s story appears to be emblematic of a broader pattern – where government accounts of encounters with immigration agents crumble under the weight of later scrutiny.

Last October, Marimar Martinez, a 30-year-old US citizen, survived being shot multiple times by a Customs and Border Protection agent after her vehicle and a CBP SUV collided during an immigration crackdown in Chicago.

The government claimed Martinez had rammed the agent’s car several times and DHS called the agent’s shots “defensive fire.” But other evidence, including video and text messages of the officer bragging about the shooting, bolstered Martinez’s account and prompted a judge to dismiss the federal charges against her.

In Minnesota earlier this year, an ICE officer shot Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg through the front door of his home. Sosa-Celis and his cousin Alfredo A. Aljorna initially faced federal charges after DHS said they had attacked the agent with a snow shovel or a broomstick, prompting him to fire a defensive shot.

But that account differed from what the men and their family members shared in interviews and videos livestreamed as they made 911 calls. And video captured by a city camera failed to support the agent’s version of events, according to prosecutors. In May, the ICE agent was charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime.

In January, Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was fatally shot by an ICE agent. And Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was fatally shot by two DHS officers later that same month. In both those cases, the government’s original accounts of the shootings faced scrutiny as videos and witness accounts emerged.

‘This is the best country in the world’

ICE officers had identified Hurtado-Cariaco as a member or close associate of Tren de Aragua before last summer’s altercation with agents, according to HSI. His alleged connection to the gang was based in part on “a prominent tattoo of a clock with an ‘all seeing eye’” on his forearm.

McWilliams said the date on the tattoo – April 30, 2018 – represents the date his client’s son was born. The tattoo has the silhouette of a man and a child above the date. He said the way the government identifies members of Tren de Aragua “make McCarthyism look intellectual and rational.”

At his sentencing, Hurtado-Cariaco said he was accused of belonging to a terrorist organization “that I myself detest and abhor.”

Hurtado-Cariaco presented his asylum claim in June 2023 and was paroled into the US a year later. With his work authorization, he held jobs at a Walmart store and, most recently, as a food delivery driver.

“I don’t think that there are many people that come in this court who have been so vilified by the United States government and by the media as Gabriel Hurtado-Cariaco,” McWilliams said at his client’s sentencing.

“He was a tortured dissident who had his toenails ripped out by the Maduro regime who refused to stand against his hungry countrymen.”

During a 2023 credible fear interview with immigration officials, Hurtado-Cariaco said he deserted the Venezuelan military in 2018 because he opposed the Maduro government. “If you are in the military you have to be with the government and have no freedom of speech,” he said.

“I did not support the corrupt government. All money goes to their pocket and people go hungry,” he said in the interview. “They work hard and the military gets very little and they send out to the streets to block marches where people are hungry. The military forces you to support the government and I do not.”

At his sentencing, days before America celebrated its 250th birthday, Hurtado-Cariaco described himself as “a good son, a good father, a good brother, and a good friend.”

He thanked the United States for accepting him into “this land of the free” after he was “persecuted and tortured for my political opinion and for being against a dictatorship” in Venezuela.

He added, “I still believe with utmost certainty that this is the best country in the world… I will continue believing in God and in this country and in service to the community that I belong to.”

Two weeks after Hurtado-Cariaco’s sentencing, McWilliams said ICE took his client into custody July 10. He’s scheduled to appear before an immigration judge July 29.

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