Editor's note: This interview was recorded on Jan. 16, 2026. You can find more reporting from OPB here.
Two people were shot and injured in Portland, Oregon, by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol on Jan. 8, 2026, one day after a U.S. citizen was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Troy Brynelson joined host Phineas Pope to discuss the latest information.
Phineas Pope: Walk us back, tell us what happened during the shooting last week.
Troy Brynelson: Last week, a team of U.S. border patrol agents tried to stop a red pickup truck in East Portland, and the encounter quickly devolved into the shooting that we're talking about.
I think it's worth noting, it happened 24 hours after the shooting in Minneapolis. But unlike Minneapolis, there hasn't been any rapidly circulating video on social media. So much of what we're talking about right now comes from court records and federal prosecutors themselves.
The shooting involves six agents who were traveling in four separate cars. We don't know much of the beat-by-beat details. However, we know that there were two shots that were fired, according to the agents involved. They tried to stop this red pickup truck and did so inside of a medical office, and the driver and his passenger then fled the scene after the shooting. They fled several blocks away, called 911, and they were rushed to a local hospital.
Pope: What do we now know about the two people who were shot and their conditions?
Brynelson: The two individuals are Luis David Nino-Moncada and his passenger, Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras. And their conditions, as we know it, are sourced to leaked 911 dispatcher audio, which says that Nino-Moncada was shot in the arm and Zambrano-Contreras was shot in the chest.
Both of them have been stabilized and released from the hospital. Nino-Moncada is effectively in federal custody right now, awaiting trial. Zambrano-Contreras, on the other hand, was sent from Portland to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, and that's where she's been held ever since.
Pope: And we know Nino-Moncada had a preliminary hearing on Wednesday. Can you tell us more about what we learned there?
Brynelson: There's a slew of accusations around these two individuals, and I'm going to try to separate them out.
First, the Trump administration says that all of this was set off because these two individuals are linked to Tren de Aragua, the gang from Venezuela that has been involved and named in a lot of these deportation cases by the Trump administration. But those specific connections aren't really clear yet.
And then there's what happened during the shooting and what we've learned since then.
I referenced earlier that we now have these court records. Part of what happened, according to federal investigators, is that when there was this initial traffic stop, they accused Nino-Moncada of using the truck to ram the unmarked cars that border patrol agents were using. And it's unclear when exactly that happened — the timetable between the drive to escape and the shots being fired — but federal investigators are charging him with aggravated assault and damaging federal property.
Pope: What about Zambrano-Contreras? What was she charged with?
Brynelson: This is where it gets pretty interesting. Again, we're kind of dealing with these dueling narratives about what happened in the shooting and then also their connection to this gang in Venezuela.
First of all, Zambrano-Contreras was charged with illegal entry for crossing into the border around El Paso, Texas, two years ago. She hasn't actually been charged with anything related to the shooting, but federal records suggest that it was her alleged ties with Tren de Aragua that sort of set everything off.
Federal investigators say that she was caught up in prostitution, which at one point led to her being forcibly held in a room and robbed last summer. To retrieve her belongings, according to federal records, she called a friend who brought more friends, and there was a shooting. The records implicate that these men were Tren de Aragua gang members who were also linked to another shooting in the Portland Metro last year. It was the pursuit of Zambrano-Contreras that apparently led them to this traffic stop and led to the shooting.
Pope: This shooting drew national attention when it first happened, again coming right after Minneapolis. Why do you think so many people have been watching this case?
Brynelson: I think you hit the nail on the head. We just started the third week of January, and we've had three clear cases of deadly force use by federal agents during this immigration crackdown. There was the killing of the Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole [Macklin] Good, there was the shooting in Portland that we're discussing here, and then there was another shooting in Minneapolis.
I think this sort of spasm of violence is concerning for a lot of people. And there's a lot of questions about whether immigration agents who are really pouring into cities are being trained appropriately.
We know the bar is set incredibly high, even for local law enforcement to be held accountable for using deadly force. But for federal officers whose records are harder to obtain, who can be reassigned hundreds or thousands of miles away, there's clearly concern right now that the violence — hopefully to our readers at least — doesn't continue as it has since the start of this year.
Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.
