DoJ attorneys resign over decision not to investigate agent in Minneapolis ICE shooting

Key Highlights

• 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 Friday. The resignations are the latest in a flow of departures from the civil rights division since 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 engagin.