Federal prosecutors quit in protest over lack of investigation into ICE shooting

A wave of federal prosecutors in Minnesota and Washington DC have resigned in protest over the justice department’s decision not to hold a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of an unarmed US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis.

Six lawyers from the US attorney’s office in Minnesota quit on Tuesday over the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter of Renee Nicole Good, the New York Times reported.

Among them is Joseph H Thompson, who was second in command at the office and led a large-scale fraud inquiry last year that led in part to the Trump administration sending a surge of immigration agents into the state.

Thompson and his colleagues, the Times said, were upset at senior justice department officials demanding a criminal inquiry into any ties between Good and her widow, Becca, into activist groups; and the refusal of the FBI to allow state investigators to join its investigation of the shooting.

Separately, four leaders of a crucial division in the US justice department have also resigned. The lawyers left the civil rights division, which has a criminal investigations unit that investigates the use of force by police officers, according to MS Now, citing three people it said were briefed about the departures.

The resignations follow a decision by Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration-aligned assistant attorney general for civil rights, not to investigate the 7 January killing of Good by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

Dhillon told the unit the week before that it would not be involved in any investigation, Reuters reported a source as saying.

A justice department spokesperson confirmed the resignations in a statement to the Guardian but denied they were related to the Minneapolis shooting.

“Although we typically don’t comment on personnel matters, we can confirm that the criminal section leadership gave notice to depart the civil rights division and requested to participate in the Department of Justice’s early retirement program well before the events in Minnesota,” the statement said.

“Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

The FBI – which seized total control of the investigation after freezing out local officials – is looking into Good’s “possible connections to activist groups”, according to the New York Times.

A succession of Trump administration officials, including the president himself, have portrayed Good, without presenting evidence, as a “domestic terrorist” or “paid agitator” – while video of her confrontation with Ross appears to show her trying to steer her vehicle away from him when she was shot three times in the face.

Multiple career prosecutors in Dhillon’s office offered to lead an inquiry into the shooting but were told not to do so, CBS News reported on Friday.

The resignations are the latest in a flow of departures from the civil rights division since Donald Trump began his second term a year earlier. In May, the Guardian reported that more than 250 attorneys had left, been reassigned or accepted a deferred resignation offer since January, a roughly 70% reduction.

Dhillon, a former Republican official in California, and an election denier who promoted the “big lie” that Trump’s 2020 election defeat was fraudulent, was confirmed by the Senate in April. She worked quickly to realign the division’s priorities away from its longstanding work tackling discrimination and protecting the rights of marginalized groups and towards Trump’s political goals, including exposing voter fraud, which is rare, and focusing on anti-transgender issues.

“I don’t think it’s an overstatement to see this as the end of the division as we’ve known it,” a civil rights division attorney told the Guardian at the time.

Subsequently, in September, the online news outlet Notus reported that only two lawyers remained out of 36 at the justice department’s public integrity unit assigned to investigations of corrupt politicians and law enforcement.

“Investigating officials to determine if they broke the law, defied policy, failed to de-escalate and resorted to deadly force without basis is one of the civil rights division’s most solemn duties,” Kristen Clarke, who led the division in the Biden administration, told MS Now.

“Prosecutors of the civil rights division have, for decades, been the nation’s leading experts in this work.”

The FBI investigation into Good’s alleged links to activist groups protesting ICE activities in Minneapolis and elsewhere, meanwhile, aligns with White House messaging seeking to blame the victim for her death and absolve the ICE agent of responsibility.

In the days since Good’s killing, numerous Trump administration officials, including the vice-president, JD Vance, and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, have repeatedly alleged without evidence that she was engaging in domestic terrorism – and that Ross was forced to shoot to save his own life and the lives of others. Good, Noem said, had been “stalking” officers.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Trump published a post on his Truth Social platform asking: “Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community where there are thousands of … deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention.”

Family members say Good, a mother of three children, had just dropped her six-year-old son off at school. And video shows her waving ICE vehicles past her car despite the insistence of Vance and others that she was deliberately blocking traffic and “impeding” their work.

“This is classic terrorism,” Vance said.

Officials in Minneapolis have contradicted the administration’s assertions and condemned its rush to judgment before an investigation had taken place.

“They’re calling the victim a domestic terrorist. They’re calling the actions of the agent involved as some form of defensive posture. We know that they’ve already determined much of the investigation,” the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, said in a press conference on Friday.