The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer accused of sexually assaulting women in Chicago’s suburbs is a “flawed” and “weak” man who disgraced his family and country — but he is not guilty of robbing and raping his alleged victims, his lawyer argued Wednesday.
Rather, CBP officer Luis Uribe turned out to be “the perfect mark” for members of a prostitution ring overseen by a boss in China, the defense attorney insisted.
“There’s a mountain of evidence that [Uribe’s] a flawed human,” attorney Michael Clancy said. “But there’s no evidence of what he’s charged with.”
Clancy challenged the credibility of Uribe’s alleged victims as he launched his defense of the immigration officer accused of using his gun and badge to sexually assault four women in Schaumburg and Naperville in 2022. Uribe’s trial kicked off Wednesday with commentary from Clancy and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Shih.
Uribe, 45, has been held in federal custody ever since his Dec. 9, 2025, arrest. He is on trial in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.
The trial’s first witnesses took the stand later Wednesday, including an expert in commercial sex work and a former supervisor of Uribe’s. But Clancy continued to challenge the feds’ evidence, particularly when it came to the testimony of a retired Schaumburg police sergeant who’d conducted an earlier investigation.
Uribe is charged with 10 counts of deprivation of civil rights under color of law and one count of brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence. Though his indictment became public near the end of last year’s Operation Midway Blitz deportation campaign, it is not related to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement effort.
Shih kicked the trial off Wednesday by showing jurors a photo of the badge Uribe once carried. The prosecutor said it “looks like a bald eagle sitting on top of a shield — a gold shield.”
“We are here because the defendant was not only derelict in his duty — he violated it,” Shih said. “Actually, he perverted it. He went from investigating crimes to committing them.”
Uribe allegedly committed six attacks between February and October 2022, while being primarily assigned to O’Hare Airport. Shih explained to jurors how, during one attack, Uribe “pushed his way” into a hotel room, “pulled out his badge with an eagle on it, and he pulled out a black handgun.”
The prosecutor described how Uribe raped the women, telling jurors one “was terrified and she was disgusted,” and another was afraid Uribe would kill her.
Uribe became “such a problem in the Chinese community,” Shih told jurors, that an effort was made to obtain a photograph of Uribe to circulate. A photo was eventually taken during a meeting at the Royal Buffet in Hoffman Estates.
Prosecutors have said the photo was taken during a meeting Uribe had with a sex worker, and that Uribe was offered free sex during the meeting to end the attacks.
However, Clancy told jurors it was “insulting” to say Uribe’s alleged victims are “part of the Chinese community.” Rather, he said they “are part of a criminal organization that runs prostitution and other crimes.”
The defense attorney said that, around 2020 and 2021, Uribe visited a prostitute who turned out to be the “on-the-ground Chicago boss of a prostitution ring that is [run] by another boss, located in China.”
Clancy said Uribe made the “fatal mistake” of telling that woman he worked for Homeland Security.
“They are hustlers,” Clancy said of the alleged victims. “They are prostitutes. They are liars.”
Before the trial wrapped for the day, jurors heard from retired Schaumburg Police Sgt. Douglas Leschewski. He explained how he went to a Days Inn on Higgins Road in the northwest suburb on Oct. 4, 2022, to follow up on a voicemail left with the police department over the previous weekend. He said he wound up speaking with a maintenance man and two women.
One of the women barely spoke English, so the second woman acted as a translator. Leschewski said they explained how a man had forced his way into one of the rooms, put a gun and a badge on a nightstand, robbed one of the women of $1,800 and sexually assaulted her. He also said they showed him the photo of Uribe taken at the buffet in Hoffman Estates.
Leschewski acknowledged that no one answered when he tried knocking on other doors in the hotel. He said the women did not agree to visit a hospital to be tested with a sexual assault kit. And when he checked the hotel’s video surveillance system, he said there were no recordings from the time of the incident.
The hotel’s management apparently had a spotty history when it came to cooperating with law enforcement, though. That’s something Leschewski previously told the FBI, Clancy pointed out. So when Leschewski said there was no recording from the hotel, Clancy told him, “it was already erased.”
“That’s your word,” Leschewski said. “Not mine.”