Top federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned after the Department of Justice pushed to investigate the widow of Renee Good and rebuffed an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fatally shot her last week.
Veteran prosecutor Joseph Thompson, who was previously appointed by Donald Trump to serve as Minnesota’s acting U.S. attorney and first assistant U.S. attorney, had overseen a sprawling fraud investigation at the center of the president’s surge of federal law enforcement officers in the state.
Thompson is among at least four career prosecutors who quit Tuesday.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Melinda Williams, Harry Jacobs, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez also reportedly resigned.
Their abrupt departure follows an exodus at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, where at least four officials allegedly left in frustration over division chief Harmeet Dhillon’s refusal to investigate a fatal shooting that has sparked widespread protests and political outrage.
An official with the Justice Department told The Independent that those civil rights division chiefs gave notice of their departure “well before the events in Minnesota. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
“There is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement to The Independent.
In response to questions about Thompson’s resignation, a Justice Department official defended investigations in the wake of Good’s death.
“As with any officer-involved shooting, each law enforcement agency has an internal investigation protocol, including DHS,” the official said. “As such, [ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility] has its own investigation underway. This runs parallel to any FBI investigation.”
Good, a 37-year-old mother of three children, was fatally shot by ICE officer Jonathan Ross while she appeared to be driving away from immigration agents who surrounded her car January 7.
Administration officials swiftly labeled her a “violent rioter” who intentionally used her car to ram the agent in an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Video analysis from footage taken by several witnesses — as well footage from Ross himself, who was filming his interaction with Good and her wife with one hand while grabbing his firearm and shooting at her with his other — shows masked officers approaching her car in the middle of a residential street.
An officer can be heard saying “get out of the f***ing car” while an agent pulls on the outside handle.
Good’s car backs up slightly, then pulls forward and begins to veer to the right. As her car moves forward, Ross moves to the front of her car. He fires three shots and her car accelerates and crashes further down the street.
Her wife Becca Good said in a statement last week that she and her wife had “stopped to support our neighbors” when ICE agents arrived on the scene. “We had whistles,” she wrote. “They had guns.”
Thompson reportedly objected to the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by an alleged demand to pursue a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to people familiar with the matter speaking to The New York Times.
He had initially sought to investigate the shooting in conjunction with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that reviews police shootings, though state officials have said that the Justice Department has effectively cast them aside.
Investigators are reportedly probing whether Good was involved with activist groups that have been protesting Trump’s mass deportation campaign and “instigated” events before the officer killed her.
The president and administration officials, meanwhile, have labeled Good a “professional agitator” while accusing Democratic-aligned groups of orchestrating “violent resistance against federal law enforcement,” without evidence.
The Trump administration has pushed out dozens of career prosecutors across the country over refusals to drop cases or bring politically charged prosecutions against the president’s perceived enemies and longtime foes.
At least five Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys have resigned over political interference from the Trump administration, including prosecutors in Manhattan who were pressured to drop a case against former Mayor Eric Adams and a U.S. attorney in Virginia tasked with prosecuting New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Meanwhile, federal judges have disqualified at least five U.S. attorneys who were determined to be serving unlawfully after they were appointed by the president.
Last year, roughly 10,000 attorneys worked across the Justice Department and its components, including the FBI.
But the Trump administration has fired, forced out or offered buyouts to roughly 5,500 attorneys and other Justice Department employees, according to Justice Connection, an advocacy group that has tracked departures.
