Several attorneys in the US justice department’s civil rights division have reportedly resigned in protest at a decision not to investigate the fatal shooting of an unarmed US citizen by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis – while the FBI presses ahead with an inquiry into the victim.
At least four leaders of the division’s criminal investigations section have stepped down, according to MS Now, citing three people it said were briefed about the departures.
It follows a decision by Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration-aligned assistant attorney general for civil rights, not to investigate the 7 January killing of Renee Nicole Good by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, as would be usual in the case of a shooting by law enforcement.
Separately, 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 Guardian has contacted the justice department for comment.
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 homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, 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.
JD Vance, the vice-president, repeated the claims in an angry rant during a White House press briefing on Thursday, alleging Good was part of a “broader leftwing network” working tirelessly and using “domestic terror techniques” to stop the Trump administration from enforcing immigration laws. He offered no evidence to back up his claim.
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.
