Brandon Ortiz-Vite is sitting in a Michigan prison, serving up to 102 years for brutally murdering his girlfriend and leaving her body on the side of the road.
He has some requests.
He wants $75 million from the federal government. He also wants a formal public apology from President Donald Trump. Oh, and he wants to be made an American citizen. Ortiz-Vite is an illegal alien who was deported once in 2020 after he was convicted of DUI, but snuck back into the country illegally via the Southern border.
Quite the demand list for a convicted killer one might say.
The $75 million is for what Trump's statements allegedly did to his reputation. The public apology would require the President of the United States to formally acknowledge that mentioning a confessed killer's case at campaign rallies was not nice during the run up to the 2024 election.. And the citizenship — which he would need to be granted by the same country he's currently suing, from a prison cell, after murdering one of its citizens — is the detail that takes the longest to process.
This is not a joke. Ortiz-Vite has filed all of this in a federal lawsuit.
The lawsuit says Trump wronged him. In 2024, Trump used Ortiz-Vite's mugshot in campaign commercials, described him as part of America's wave of "murderers, rapists, and drug traffickers," and called him "America's problem" at a rally in Grand Rapids — the same city where, in March 2024, Ortiz-Vite shot Ruby Garcia, 25, multiple times and left her body along a roadside.
His words from the filing:
"I was put into a category. Who I was as a person no longer mattered! What only mattered was my race."
He confessed to the crime. He turned himself in. A Michigan court sentenced him to between 39 and 102 years behind bars. None of that appears in the lawsuit's list of grievances.
What does appear: the argument that Trump's public statements caused him emotional distress. That being called a murderer in public — after murdering someone — constituted an attack on his character. That he deserved to be treated as an individual rather than reduced to a symbol.
Criminal defense attorney Matthew Borgula assessed the case plainly: the suit "will likely not survive" initial court screening. Trump's characterizations were, in his words, "substantially true."
But something has to account for the fact that this filing exists at all — that a man serving up to a century in a Michigan prison, after being deported once and entering illegally a second time, after confessing to killing an American woman, looked at his situation and decided that Donald Trump was the one who owed him something.
Ruby Garcia was 25 years old. She has no demands. Her killer has three.