Brandon Ortiz-Vite is serving 39 to 102 years for the second-degree murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia, whose body was found along U.S. 131 in Grand Rapids, Michigan in March 2024. From his cell in Kent County Jail, the 27-year-old illegal immigrant has filed a federal lawsuit against President Trump, demanding $75 million in damages, a public apology, and United States citizenship.
The balls of some people.
Ortiz-Vite's complaint names President Donald Trump and White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Steven Cheung as defendants. His grievance is that Trump visited Grand Rapids during the 2024 campaign and talked about how he murdered his girlfriend in cold blood and left her body on the side of the road — which Ortiz-Vite says caused him extreme emotional distress.
"I was put into a category. Who I was as a person no longer mattered!" Ortiz-Vite wrote in the filing. He added, "I took full responsibility for my actions but for them to use my case for political gain on TV was unjust. Humiliating."
The illegal immigrant convicted of murdering a young American woman feels humiliated.
The legal substance here is roughly as thin as you'd expect. Matthew Borgula, a criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, told Fox News that "federal law requires courts to screen prisoner suits before anyone is served. This complaint will likely not survive that screening."
Borgula went further: "Trump's statements were substantially true, and being publicly embarrassed by a politician isn't a constitutional violation." He noted that while presidential immunity covers official acts and campaign statements can sometimes fall outside that protection, "this suit fails for more basic reasons" — namely, that complaining about accurate public statements isn't a cause of action.
Ortiz-Vite's was an illegal alien, his DACA status expired in 2019. He was arrested for a DWI in 2020. But under Biden's rules he was not deported at the time. Just four years later, he had upgraded his criminal pursuits to include murder. And now, from prison, his legal position is that the real injustice was someone talking about it on television.
"The shame it brought to my family name is a reality I have to live with now," he wrote. Not the shame of killing a 25-year-old woman. The shame of people knowing about it.
Former Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon connected the lawsuit to a broader pattern. "As long as we have Democrats jetting to other countries to coddle criminal illegal aliens over margaritas, this level of arrogance and entitlement from convicted murderers will continue," Dixon said.
There's a through-line from sanctuary city policies to taxpayer-funded legal aid for illegal immigrants to a convicted murderer treating the federal courts like a customer service desk. Every layer of the system that told Ortiz-Vite he was a victim of circumstance rather than a perpetrator of violence led, eventually, to a jail cell where a man doing 39 to 102 years for murder decided the real problem was his reputation.
The lawsuit demands three things: $75 million, a public apology from the President of the United States, and American citizenship. For context, Ruby Garcia's family got a funeral.
That's the exchange rate.
