Baltimore man from Portugal shot by ICE pleads guilty to damaging vans

Lily Carey, The Baltimore Sun on Apr 27, 2026

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Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins, a Baltimore man who was left with critical injuries after being shot by ICE agents in Glen Burnie in December, pleaded guilty on Thursday to damaging two government-owned vehicles before he was shot.

Judges in the U.S. District Court for Maryland sentenced Sousa-Martins, 30, to about three months in federal prison for destruction of government property, which he has already served. But Sousa-Martins, a Portuguese citizen who immigrated to the U.S. in 2008, is still in ICE custody for overstaying his visa, and could remain in custody for years, his defense said.

ICE argued that Sousa-Martins had intentionally driven his van into an ICE vehicle when agents approached him in Glen Burnie on Dec. 24. The incident caused a combined $17,000 of damage to two ICE vehicles.

According to court documents, agents approached Sousa-Martins outside 504 West Court St., surrounded his van with their vehicles and smashed the windows in an effort to detain Sousa-Martins. He attempted to drive forward, away from ICE agents, and then backed up into one of the ICE vehicles, damaging that vehicle and another behind it.

Court documents show that one of the ICE agents reported hearing a “loud squeal” from Sousa-Martins’ wheels as he backed up into the ICE vehicle, leading the agent to believe Sousa-Martins was “intentionally backing up at a high rate of speed into the officer’s vehicle before damaging it.”

As Sousa-Martins drove forward, another agent shot at him 13 times, injuring Sousa-Martins as well as Solomon Antonio Serrano-Esquivel, a passenger in one of the ICE vehicles who was already in federal custody. Sousa-Martins was struck twice, in his thigh and his ribs, according to court documents.

His defense argued that he had “not received adequate care” while in ICE custody; he was detained by ICE after the Dec. 24 incident and was taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals Service on Jan. 16 in connection with the charge of destruction of government property.

In January, the Capital Gazette reported that ICE had originally claimed Serrano-Esquivel was a passenger in Sousa-Martins’ vehicle during the altercation. After Anne Arundel County Police investigated the issue and confirmed Serrano-Esquivel had been in a separate vehicle, federal authorities changed their story. They declined to respond to questions about their investigation.

According to court documents, Sousa-Martins came to the U.S. from Portugal in 2008, when he was 13, to visit his father in New Jersey. At the end of the trip, Sousa-Martins told federal prosecutors that his father took his passport and prevented him from returning to Portugal so his father could claim him as a dependent for tax purposes.

Sousa-Martins lived with his father at first, but faced an abusive home environment and was kicked out when he was 16, court documents say. He remained in New Jersey during his teenage years and moved to Baltimore in 2020, where he lives with his partner and two children.

At the time of the ICE altercation, he had “taken steps to begin the process of becoming a United States citizen but had not yet been granted citizenship,” court documents say.

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