What started as a shouting match over a bicycle turned into 34-year-old Christopher Trenchfield sitting in the back of a police car being told by police that he was being charged with attempted murder. This would begin a two-year-long fight for justice involving letters to senators, letters to the president, collection of evidence, legal battling and, of course, administrative remedies.
Christopher Trenchfield is a Jamaican national who was living in Florida with a valid US visa. On March 6, 2023, he got into an argument with a neighbor over the ownership of a bicycle. It quickly escalated into a physical altercation. The neighbor swung at Trenchfield, punched him in the face, and then proceeded to pull a long knife from his waistband. Trenchfield reacted by running away while the neighbor chased him. The neighbor then proceeded to call the police, and when they arrived on the scene, he panicked and decided to lie, claiming that Trenchfield had threatened him with a gun. While being interrogated, the neighbor repeatedly stated to one of the officers who arrived on the scene, Officer Gober, that he did not wish to press charges. The officer pressured and coerced the neighbor to press charges anyway. This would be the first sign that grave violations of rights and abuses of power would take place.
After interrogating the neighbor, two other officers entered Trenchfield’s home without presenting a search warrant—a violation of Trenchfield’s 4th Amendment rights. During this search, Gober claimed to have discovered a firearm and falsely alleged that he witnessed Trenchfield discarding it. However, no fingerprints, DNA evidence, or credible testimony connected Trenchfield to the firearm. Afterwards, Officer Gober interrogated a witness who corroborated Trenchfield’s recounting of the events, but he did not report this information. It was obtained later through the witness' sworn affidavit report. After all of these infringements on Trenchfield’s rights, Officer Gober arrested him without reading his Miranda rights—a violation of Trenchfield’s 5th Amendment rights.
Trenchfield was transported to the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, where he later learned that he had been formally charged with aggravated assault, battery, and tampering with physical evidence. The next day, on March 7, 2023, Trenchfield was brought to court for his first appearance and was informed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had filed a detainer on him for the purpose of deportation. He faced state charges, federal charges, and immigration proceedings. Unable to post bail, he sat in the local jail waiting for a terrifyingly uncertain fate.
Two months later, Mr. Trenchfield’s fate became even more uncertain. On May 3, 2023, two individuals identifying themselves as U.S. Marshals apprehended Trenchfield from Bay County Jail, informed him he was facing federal charges, and moved him to a federal detention center. Mr. Trenchfield was assigned a Federal Public Defender to represent him, Juan J. Rodriguez, and his case moved to federal court.
Mr. Rodriguez did not seem to be acting in the service of Trenchfield’s interests and needs. Rodriguez refused to comply with Trenchfield’s wish to have a detention hearing on one of his court appearances, submitted documents to the court that falsely categorized Trenchfield as a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, and refused to file any motion to dismiss Trenchfield’s case. At one point, Mr. Rodriguez even texted Mr. Trenchfield that he would be going home after a court appearance to “sit back and relax then have a drink of whisky while you are going back [to jail] lol.” Trenchfield was made to sign a plea agreement, which included the following addenda: (1) Mr. Trenchfield agreed to cooperate with the government; (2) Mr. Trenchfield agreed to forfeit his rights on challenging on appeal; (3) Mr. Trenchfield agreed that the federal charge was factual on the basis of the state charges.
On November 30, 2023, 8 months into Trenchfield’s detention, his attorney fabricated, yet again, another document. This time, it was a psychological forensic report forged with a psychologist’s signature. A month later, on December 28, 2023, a judge cited that same report and declared that Trenchfield was “suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering [him] Mentally Incompetent to the extent that [he] is unable to understand the nature and consequences of the preceding against [him].” As a result, the judge ruled that he be committed to a medical facility. He was sent to Federal Medical Center Butner (FMC Butner) in North Carolina on September 10, 2024, one year and six months into his detention. Trenchfield asserts that prison staff, his attorney, and other governmental officials were collaborating to have him civilly committed and subsequently medicated, thus impairing his ability to expose the injustices that he faced by their doing. This raises concerns about the government’s use of forcible medical institutionalization on marginalized people and how this tactic was used on Trenchfield to add further to his suffering, along with keeping him silenced.
During this time, unbeknownst to Mr. Trenchfield, the State Attorney of Florida was moving to dismiss the state charges previously filed against Trenchfield due to lack of credible evidence. Documents that Trenchfield later received revealed what he witnessed first hand: a coordinated attempt by Charging Officer Gober and a special agent to deprive him of his due process rights. The documents showed email communication between the two officers on March 8, 2023, just two days after Trenchfield was arrested. The documents showed that the special agent tampered with Officer Gober’s body camera video, as well as fabricated multiple false reports that falsely accused Trenchfield of being in possession of a firearm. Trenchfield had also received other classified documents that, altogether, revealed a multi-institutional conspiracy that consisted of 28 or more individual agencies, entities, departments, and two federal judges who were colluding to keep Trenchfield detained for a crime he did not commit and silence him in the process.
To make matters worse, Trenchfield was suffering multiple abuses during his time in detention. One of the worst of which occurred on March 2, 2024, approximately one year into his detention, when Deputy Officer Luke at the Santa Rosa County Jail approached Trenchfield while he was trying to eat a meal. The Deputy Officer grabbed him by the neck and began choking Trenchfield until he became dizzy. Another Deputy Officer pointed a taser gun at Trenchfield and stated, “Motherfucker go on the fucking ground.” Roughly fifteen or more officers were waiting outside the dining area, where they physically assaulted him, placing him in handcuffs and shackles that went all the way to his ankles. While Trenchfield was handcuffed and immobilized, Deputy Officer Luke continued choking him. They spit on him while continuing to call him a racial slur, then another Deputy uttered, “We are preparing to beat the fuck out of you.” A sergeant took out his cellphone and began recording while persuading a Deputy Officer and a Lieutenant Officer to stab Trenchfield’s eyes to prevent him from looking at him while he was recording. Trenchfield heard a Deputy Officer say to a Lieutenant Officer, “We cannot kill him inside here because remember his [Jamaican] consulate recently contacted the jail.” As if this event were not already horrific, that same day, officers forced Trenchfield to lie face down on a slab of concrete and told him to put his hands in a toilet and clean out the human excrement out of it, or else he would be tased and pepper-sprayed. He then slept on the cold slab of concrete without any mattress or blanket for the next five days. This outrageous and violent act of physical assault, abuse, and humiliation caused immense bodily injury and pain to Trenchfield, including a swollen throat (tonsil) and a permanently fractured wrist that required surgery. These indefensible acts of violence and abuse of power are an example of hate crimes, and not the only ones that Trenchfield would be subjected to.
These abuses led Mr. Trenchfield to reach out to The Remedy Project on January 27th, 2025, nearly two years into the horror show his life had become. He heard that The Remedy Project supported people like him in federal prison, and he knew that outside help was necessary to put a stop to the injustices he was facing. We started with an administrative remedy about the guard abuse, but over the course of our early correspondence with Mr. Trenchfield, we uncovered that the abuses against him went much, much deeper.
A few days after Mr. Trenchfield’s first contact with us, a federal judge presiding over his case finally dismissed the charges against him and issued an order to release him from detention. However, in an untenable and egregious act of illegality, staff at FMC Butner refused to comply with the order, infringing on Trenchfield’s rights under the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments. This calculated obstruction of the authority of the judicial system was an abuse of power that unlawfully kept Trenchfield detained for an additional three months. This is when our fight for Mr. Trenchfield truly began.
The purpose of defying the judge’s order was to supply the government with additional time to deport Trenchfield. The detainer that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had filed the day after Trenchfield’s arrest set their efforts into motion. On July 13, 2023, four months into Trenchfield’s detention, his attorney told him that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) had found him deportable, and a judge would hold a deportation hearing to deport him within 90 days. In another attempt to work towards Trenchfield’s deportation, one year and seven months into his detention, staff at FMC Butner withheld his legal documents, including his immigration papers, after he had been imprisoned for six weeks in a Special Housing Unit, or solitary confinement. In this way, Trenchfield’s case is not only a matter of human rights abuses and corruption within the U.S. criminal legal system, but also a matter of immigrant rights.
Adding to the lengthy list of illegalities, staff members at FMC Butner, including the warden, were denying the Jamaican Consulate from visiting Trenchfield—a direct violation of the Vienna Convention of 1963. The staff’s violation of international law was not only illegal but also an intentional attempt to impede Trenchfield from accessing one of the only external resources at his disposal that could meaningfully intervene on his behalf. Hindering intervention from outside resources that might uncover the trail of abuses of power and corruption was the point.
Students spent the spring semester of 2025 writing administrative remedies and letters to US officials and Jamaican officials exposing the cruelty and illegality of Trenchfield's situation. And we won! These efforts were successful in compelling the government to finally withdraw their petition to deport Trenchfield on May 7, 2025 and to prop up the Jamaican consulate to seize a monumental win for him and get him released on May 13, 2025.
Again and again, we can see from Trenchfield’s story that there are not just a few bad actors in the systems and institutions that make up the criminal “justice” system. The rot that led to Christopher Trenchfield’s unjust detention can be found within all of the institutions that are part of the criminal legal system, from the bottom of the hierarchy (e.g., the police) all the way to the top (e.g., the Department of Justice and its branches). In totality, Christopher Trenchfield spent approximately two years and two months wrongfully detained for a crime he did not commit. The system is completely corrupt and unjust to the root. But when the people stand up, such as the students at The Remedy Project, we are able to expose the utter inhumanity of the system and we are able to make a true impact on the lives of those who suffer in the system.
In Christopher Trenchfield’s own words:
“If this organization did not exist, I truly believe I would have perished in the prison system. They would have broken me down completely and even tried to falsely label me as mentally ill…In the end, everything was reversed, and I was released. Not falsely deported, but safely delivered to my Jamaican consulate. All of this happened because of the intense dedication and advocacy of Mr. Simpson and The Remedy Student Project student volunteers. They saved my life.”
What started as a shouting match over a bicycle turned into 34-year-old Christopher Trenchfield sitting in the back of a police car being told by police that he was being charged with attempted murder. This would begin a two-year-long fight for justice involving letters to senators, letters to the president, collection of evidence, legal battling and, of course, administrative remedies.
Christopher Trenchfield is a Jamaican national who was living in Florida with a valid US visa. On March 6, 2023, he got into an argument with a neighbor over the ownership of a bicycle. It quickly escalated into a physical altercation. The neighbor swung at Trenchfield, punched him in the face, and then proceeded to pull a long knife from his waistband. Trenchfield reacted by running away while the neighbor chased him. The neighbor then proceeded to call the police, and when they arrived on the scene, he panicked and decided to lie, claiming that Trenchfield had threatened him with a gun. While being interrogated, the neighbor repeatedly stated to one of the officers who arrived on the scene, Officer Gober, that he did not wish to press charges. The officer pressured and coerced the neighbor to press charges anyway. This would be the first sign that grave violations of rights and abuses of power would take place.
After interrogating the neighbor, two other officers entered Trenchfield’s home without presenting a search warrant—a violation of Trenchfield’s 4th Amendment rights. During this search, Gober claimed to have discovered a firearm and falsely alleged that he witnessed Trenchfield discarding it. However, no fingerprints, DNA evidence, or credible testimony connected Trenchfield to the firearm. Afterwards, Officer Gober interrogated a witness who corroborated Trenchfield’s recounting of the events, but he did not report this information. It was obtained later through the witness' sworn affidavit report. After all of these infringements on Trenchfield’s rights, Officer Gober arrested him without reading his Miranda rights—a violation of Trenchfield’s 5th Amendment rights.
Trenchfield was transported to the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, where he later learned that he had been formally charged with aggravated assault, battery, and tampering with physical evidence. The next day, on March 7, 2023, Trenchfield was brought to court for his first appearance and was informed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had filed a detainer on him for the purpose of deportation. He faced state charges, federal charges, and immigration proceedings. Unable to post bail, he sat in the local jail waiting for a terrifyingly uncertain fate.
Two months later, Mr. Trenchfield’s fate became even more uncertain. On May 3, 2023, two individuals identifying themselves as U.S. Marshals apprehended Trenchfield from Bay County Jail, informed him he was facing federal charges, and moved him to a federal detention center. Mr. Trenchfield was assigned a Federal Public Defender to represent him, Juan J. Rodriguez, and his case moved to federal court.
Mr. Rodriguez did not seem to be acting in the service of Trenchfield’s interests and needs. Rodriguez refused to comply with Trenchfield’s wish to have a detention hearing on one of his court appearances, submitted documents to the court that falsely categorized Trenchfield as a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, and refused to file any motion to dismiss Trenchfield’s case. At one point, Mr. Rodriguez even texted Mr. Trenchfield that he would be going home after a court appearance to “sit back and relax then have a drink of whisky while you are going back [to jail] lol.” Trenchfield was made to sign a plea agreement, which included the following addenda: (1) Mr. Trenchfield agreed to cooperate with the government; (2) Mr. Trenchfield agreed to forfeit his rights on challenging on appeal; (3) Mr. Trenchfield agreed that the federal charge was factual on the basis of the state charges.
On November 30, 2023, 8 months into Trenchfield’s detention, his attorney fabricated, yet again, another document. This time, it was a psychological forensic report forged with a psychologist’s signature. A month later, on December 28, 2023, a judge cited that same report and declared that Trenchfield was “suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering [him] Mentally Incompetent to the extent that [he] is unable to understand the nature and consequences of the preceding against [him].” As a result, the judge ruled that he be committed to a medical facility. He was sent to Federal Medical Center Butner (FMC Butner) in North Carolina on September 10, 2024, one year and six months into his detention. Trenchfield asserts that prison staff, his attorney, and other governmental officials were collaborating to have him civilly committed and subsequently medicated, thus impairing his ability to expose the injustices that he faced by their doing. This raises concerns about the government’s use of forcible medical institutionalization on marginalized people and how this tactic was used on Trenchfield to add further to his suffering, along with keeping him silenced.
During this time, unbeknownst to Mr. Trenchfield, the State Attorney of Florida was moving to dismiss the state charges previously filed against Trenchfield due to lack of credible evidence. Documents that Trenchfield later received revealed what he witnessed first hand: a coordinated attempt by Charging Officer Gober and a special agent to deprive him of his due process rights. The documents showed email communication between the two officers on March 8, 2023, just two days after Trenchfield was arrested. The documents showed that the special agent tampered with Officer Gober’s body camera video, as well as fabricated multiple false reports that falsely accused Trenchfield of being in possession of a firearm. Trenchfield had also received other classified documents that, altogether, revealed a multi-institutional conspiracy that consisted of 28 or more individual agencies, entities, departments, and two federal judges who were colluding to keep Trenchfield detained for a crime he did not commit and silence him in the process.
To make matters worse, Trenchfield was suffering multiple abuses during his time in detention. One of the worst of which occurred on March 2, 2024, approximately one year into his detention, when Deputy Officer Luke at the Santa Rosa County Jail approached Trenchfield while he was trying to eat a meal. The Deputy Officer grabbed him by the neck and began choking Trenchfield until he became dizzy. Another Deputy Officer pointed a taser gun at Trenchfield and stated, “Motherfucker go on the fucking ground.” Roughly fifteen or more officers were waiting outside the dining area, where they physically assaulted him, placing him in handcuffs and shackles that went all the way to his ankles. While Trenchfield was handcuffed and immobilized, Deputy Officer Luke continued choking him. They spit on him while continuing to call him a racial slur, then another Deputy uttered, “We are preparing to beat the fuck out of you.” A sergeant took out his cellphone and began recording while persuading a Deputy Officer and a Lieutenant Officer to stab Trenchfield’s eyes to prevent him from looking at him while he was recording. Trenchfield heard a Deputy Officer say to a Lieutenant Officer, “We cannot kill him inside here because remember his [Jamaican] consulate recently contacted the jail.” As if this event were not already horrific, that same day, officers forced Trenchfield to lie face down on a slab of concrete and told him to put his hands in a toilet and clean out the human excrement out of it, or else he would be tased and pepper-sprayed. He then slept on the cold slab of concrete without any mattress or blanket for the next five days. This outrageous and violent act of physical assault, abuse, and humiliation caused immense bodily injury and pain to Trenchfield, including a swollen throat (tonsil) and a permanently fractured wrist that required surgery. These indefensible acts of violence and abuse of power are an example of hate crimes, and not the only ones that Trenchfield would be subjected to.
These abuses led Mr. Trenchfield to reach out to The Remedy Project on January 27th, 2025, nearly two years into the horror show his life had become. He heard that The Remedy Project supported people like him in federal prison, and he knew that outside help was necessary to put a stop to the injustices he was facing. We started with an administrative remedy about the guard abuse, but over the course of our early correspondence with Mr. Trenchfield, we uncovered that the abuses against him went much, much deeper.
A few days after Mr. Trenchfield’s first contact with us, a federal judge presiding over his case finally dismissed the charges against him and issued an order to release him from detention. However, in an untenable and egregious act of illegality, staff at FMC Butner refused to comply with the order, infringing on Trenchfield’s rights under the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments. This calculated obstruction of the authority of the judicial system was an abuse of power that unlawfully kept Trenchfield detained for an additional three months. This is when our fight for Mr. Trenchfield truly began.
The purpose of defying the judge’s order was to supply the government with additional time to deport Trenchfield. The detainer that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had filed the day after Trenchfield’s arrest set their efforts into motion. On July 13, 2023, four months into Trenchfield’s detention, his attorney told him that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) had found him deportable, and a judge would hold a deportation hearing to deport him within 90 days. In another attempt to work towards Trenchfield’s deportation, one year and seven months into his detention, staff at FMC Butner withheld his legal documents, including his immigration papers, after he had been imprisoned for six weeks in a Special Housing Unit, or solitary confinement. In this way, Trenchfield’s case is not only a matter of human rights abuses and corruption within the U.S. criminal legal system, but also a matter of immigrant rights.
Adding to the lengthy list of illegalities, staff members at FMC Butner, including the warden, were denying the Jamaican Consulate from visiting Trenchfield—a direct violation of the Vienna Convention of 1963. The staff’s violation of international law was not only illegal but also an intentional attempt to impede Trenchfield from accessing one of the only external resources at his disposal that could meaningfully intervene on his behalf. Hindering intervention from outside resources that might uncover the trail of abuses of power and corruption was the point.
Students spent the spring semester of 2025 writing administrative remedies and letters to US officials and Jamaican officials exposing the cruelty and illegality of Trenchfield's situation. And we won! These efforts were successful in compelling the government to finally withdraw their petition to deport Trenchfield on May 7, 2025 and to prop up the Jamaican consulate to seize a monumental win for him and get him released on May 13, 2025.
Again and again, we can see from Trenchfield’s story that there are not just a few bad actors in the systems and institutions that make up the criminal “justice” system. The rot that led to Christopher Trenchfield’s unjust detention can be found within all of the institutions that are part of the criminal legal system, from the bottom of the hierarchy (e.g., the police) all the way to the top (e.g., the Department of Justice and its branches). In totality, Christopher Trenchfield spent approximately two years and two months wrongfully detained for a crime he did not commit. The system is completely corrupt and unjust to the root. But when the people stand up, such as the students at The Remedy Project, we are able to expose the utter inhumanity of the system and we are able to make a true impact on the lives of those who suffer in the system.
In Christopher Trenchfield’s own words:
“If this organization did not exist, I truly believe I would have perished in the prison system. They would have broken me down completely and even tried to falsely label me as mentally ill…In the end, everything was reversed, and I was released. Not falsely deported, but safely delivered to my Jamaican consulate. All of this happened because of the intense dedication and advocacy of Mr. Simpson and The Remedy Student Project student volunteers. They saved my life.”
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