CHICAGO — Operation Midway Blitz was in high gear in early October when authorities made a sensational announcement: An alleged ranking member of Chicago’s Latin Kings street gang had been arrested in a murder-for-hire plot targeting Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.

The news quickly thrust Juan Espinoza Martinez, a 37-year-old Mexican-born carpenter, into the national spectacle of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation push, with the U.S. attorney’s office calling him “a ruthless and violent” gang member and senior officials holding the case up as an example of the threats immigration officials were facing from international drug cartels.

But as Espinoza Martinez heads to trial Tuesday, the rhetoric is about to meet the road.

In the months since Espinoza Martinez was charged, evidence of his supposed gang affiliations has not materialized. Prosecutors vastly toned down that aspect of the case, first dropping mention of gang affiliation in the indictment handed up by a grand jury, then saying in a pretrial hearing they only intended to prove Espinoza Martinez had an “affinity” for the Latin Kings.

Then, last week, the federal judge overseeing the case barred prosecutors from presenting any mention of his ties to the Latin Kings to avoid prejudicing the jury. Instead, prosecutors will be allowed to ask a key cooperator about what he thought Espinoza Martinez meant in certain text messages where he made references to “LK,” and play for the jury excerpts of Espinoza’s post-arrest interview, where he acknowledged telling the informant, “Latin Kings are on him.”

“Parties are barred from engaging in questioning regarding gang membership, gang affiliation, or gang affinity,” U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow said in a ruling Friday. “Parties may, however, question witnesses about the meaning of their own statements.”

The trial, which starts with jury selection Tuesday, is the first criminal case stemming from Operation Midway Blitz to go to a jury, and is sure to attract national attention.

Though limited in scope, the case is expected to offer an important litmus test as immigration-enforcement operations continue to roil Chicago and other Democrat-led cities long targeted by President Donald Trump, including Minneapolis, where the killing of a U.S. citizen by an immigration agent earlier this month has sparked nationwide protests.

Before testimony even begins, Lefkow and attorneys for both sides will face an arduous task of weeding out potential jurors who may be biased either way when it comes to immigration issues, particularly where the alleged victim is Bovino, the tough-talking face of Midway Blitz who has been a lightning rod of controversy in operations across the country.

Lefkow told the lawyers at a hearing earlier this month selecting a jury would be “pretty dicey” given that “Mr. Bovino and his people came in here not that long ago.” The most important thing was to find jurors who could set their views aside, she said.

“I would not want a jury that has either all negative or all positive views about immigration and Border Patrol because both views are part of our community,” Lefkow said.

Espinoza Martinez, who has lived in Chicago for years but is not a U.S. citizen, is charged in an indictment with a single count of solicitation of murder for hire, which carries up to 10 years in prison.

With much of the gang evidence stripped out, what’s left of the case is relatively straightforward and may only take a day or two to present to the jury.

According to the charges, Espinoza Martinez told a law enforcement source after an immigration agent shot a woman in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood on Oct. 4 “that he had dispatched members of the Latin Kings” to the area of 39th and Kedzie in response to the shooting.

A day later, the source showed a screenshot to law enforcement that had been sent to him by Espinoza Martinez depicting a conversation Espinoza Martinez had with an unknown individual, according to the complaint. In that conversation, Espinoza Martinez allegedly said, “lets get some guys out here bro.” The other person wrote back, “Let one of us be in front with the (green gun emoji),” the complaint stated.

The law enforcement source also shared Snapchat messages that Espinoza Martinez had sent him saying, “2k on information when you get him” and “10k if u take him down,” according to the complaint.

The message also stated “LK on him,” which was a reference to the Latin Kings, the complaint alleged. Included in the message was a photo of Bovino.

After his arrest on Oct. 7, Espinoza Martinez acknowledged in an interview with federal agents that he was talking about the Latin Kings in those messages, according to prosecutors.

“I said Latin Kings are on him. That’s what I said,” Espinoza Martinez told agents, according to a recent court filing.

When asked how he would know that, Espinoza Martinez allegedly responded, “Because I hear the talks. I mean, they are talking right there.”

Prosecutors alleged Espinoza Martinez also demonstrated in the interview “that he was familiar with gang structure and in-fighting,” explaining to agents how many regional leaders called “Incas” there were in the Latin Kings, and how “they’re fighting between each other right now.”

“He explained even further, ‘one of the Incas got shot by Boulevards right there,'” prosecutors wrote in the filing. “Defendant’s familiarity with such information corroborates that he is aware of other current events, or occurrences related to street gangs close in time to the charged conduct.”

Espinoza Martinez’s attorneys, Jonathan Bedi and Dena Singer, have accused prosecutors of trying to “backdoor” evidence about the Latin Kings in order to improperly bolster a weak case.

The defense team has said since the case’s inception Espinoza Martinez has no gang affiliation at all, and no prior criminal history, and should not be unfairly impugned because he happens to live — like hundreds of thousands of others — in Latin Kings territory.

The father of three, a volunteer youth sports coach who has lived in Chicago for 30 years, was arrested at the construction site where he was working long hours to support his family, his relatives and lawyers said.

Martinez’s wife, Bianca Hernandez, told the Tribune she learned of her husband’s arrest and criminal charges through news headlines.

“My older children are being bombarded with articles (and) videos spitting (and) sharing all this false information (about their father),” Hernandez said. She said she last spoke to her husband on the morning of Oct. 6, when he kissed her goodbye before leaving for work.

“He doesn’t have a single tattoo,” Hernandez said. “He spent every day off with his kids at soccer game, volleyball, math competitions. He was never out on the streets.”

In a telephone hearing in the case last week, Bedi accused the government of “trying to muddy the waters” with evidence about the Latin Kings to buttress what is an incredibly thin case.

As for an alleged “affinity” for the gang, the defense has used a football analogy in court papers to point out it’s irrelevant to the charges: “The undersigned counsel has an ‘affinity’ for the Chicago Bears, lives in Chicago, and even wears Bears colors, but, alas, is not a member of the Chicago Bears.”

Prosecutors, however, have said that whether Espinoza Martinez was a dyed-in-the-wool gang member or not, he believed the Latin Kings’ bounty was real and wanted to spread the message.

“Nearly every piece of evidence in this case touches in some fashion on the Latin Kings,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Yonan told the judge last week. The gang evidence, he said, was needed to provide context to the jury “that this was a real threat that the defendant believed to be real and was taking serious, and that was his intent.”

Bovino himself has held the case up as a prime example of the violence that immigration officials were facing, including death threats allegedly coming from street gangs and even international cartels.

“It’s a war zone out there,” Bovino told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity about Chicago on the day Espinoza Martinez was charged. “(Homeland Security) Secretary Kristi Noem mentioned a bounty on the heads of federal agents. That $2,000 to kidnap, $10,000 to kill senior Border Patrol officials and senior ICE officials here in Chicago. Now, Sean, what happens between the kidnapping and the killing portion? That’s something out of a third-world country. Is this America?”

The allegations against Espinoza Martinez have also spilled over into other cases. Two weeks after his arrest, during a hearing before U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis in an unrelated lawsuit involving the use of force by immigration agents, the judge cleared the courtroom of spectators after attorneys for the government raised national security concerns over a witness’s testimony.

A transcript of the Oct. 20 discussion, unsealed last week after lawyers for the Tribune and other media outlets intervened in the case, shows the concern was over a courtroom sketch artist drawing the features of ICE Deputy Field Office Director Sean Byers, who told Ellis there was a bounty on his head, too.

“There’s a $50,000 bounty issued by the cartels for me, 10,000 for all my family members,” Byers told the judge, according to the transcript.

“OK. And it is directed specifically to you?” Ellis asked.

“Well, all senior ICE officials. So it’s not just me. It’s … all the senior ICE officials here in the Chicago area,” Byers said, according to the transcript.

Byers confirmed that the FBI had “active investigations” on all threats, and specifically referenced the case against Espinoza Martinez, the transcript showed.

“And I believe as everybody has seen, there was also the — the bounty put out by the Latin Kings against Chief Bovino, which they did make an arrest in that, I believe, last week,” Byers said. “Following that arrest, there was an additional one put out by the cartels themselves, you know, for additional Border Patrol and, you know, ICE. That’s, you know, why I brought the issue up now.”

Ellis wound up granting the request to have the sketch artist blur out Byers’ face in his drawing of the proceedings.

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