Minneapolis
“Someone’s going to get killed.”
The warning, from an agent of the federal Homeland Security Investigations division, despatched a chill via the opposite officers in the room.
It was early January 2026. The HSI agent defined how the group was afraid about what was coming, about what appeared preordained because the Trump administration despatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Customs and Border Protection officers, Border Patrol agents and controversial Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino into Minneapolis for what the administration referred to as Operation Metro Surge.
You don’t perceive, Homeland Security officers had been making an attempt to elucidate to native prosecutors and different officers. Border Patrol — these guys should not the correct individuals to be doing immigration raids in a metropolis. They’re used to standing alone on the southern border, no backup for 50 miles, pondering of themselves because the final line of protection. They get away with lots. This goes to get ugly.
The HSI agent’s fears concerning the unprecedented surge of DHS personnel proved prophetic. The deaths of Renee Good on Wednesday, January 7, and Alex Pretti on Saturday, January 24, by the hands of federal immigration agents, adopted quickly after.
This is the story of the 18 days between the killing of Good and Pretti, the extremely questionable methods the Trump administration dealt with immigration enforcement and the shootings, and the ambiance of aggression and lying that continues to mark its enforcement operations. NCS spoke with greater than a dozen former and present members of the Trump administration, most of whom refused to go on the report out of worry of retaliation by the administration.
After Good was killed however earlier than Pretti was, Bovino requested for a name with the US lawyer for the District of Minnesota, Daniel Rosen. The name fell to prosecutors in the workplace, however Rosen didn’t take part.
Bovino was indignant that prosecutors hadn’t been submitting circumstances in opposition to protesters whom he and his agents claimed had been responsible of AFOs — assaults on federal officers.
There was a motive for that. The prosecutors in the US lawyer’s workplace, who had beforehand as a matter after all trusted the accounts of regulation enforcement officers once they introduced AFOs to their workplace, had seen lots of the immigration agents’ complaints proved to have been downright false when proof was offered.
The immigration agents, the prosecutors concluded, had been mendacity. Lots.
The prosecutors had been shocked by what Bovino stated on the decision. The taking pictures dying of Good, a 37-year-old mom of three, hadn’t pushed Bovino, who arrived to the town shortly after her dying, right into a extra cautious place. Quite the opposite.
“These people are wackos,” Bovino stated, referring to Minnesota protesters. “The shit is getting ready to come. We’re not putting up with anything in this city. It’s coming. We’re not going to calm it down, we’re going to put it down.”
He went on. “You’ve got 3,000 law enforcement agents that are fixin’ to lock this city down,” he stated. “If it doesn’t work, we’re gonna bring 4,000 more. It doesn’t matter to me. We’re going to pacify this place, we’re going to roll ‘em up. We’re not going to wait on the local PD, we’re not going to piss with it.”
He went on to speak about occupying the town. And then he made a disparaging comment about Rosen, who’s an observant Jew and couldn’t be reached throughout the Sabbath on Saturday, sneeringly referring to him as one of many “chosen people.”
The prosecutors had been shocked at what they had been listening to, that Bovino was boasting this fashion about quelling the protests, and doing so on a cellphone name with prosecutors he didn’t even know. All the fears described to them by members of the HSI had been right. Bovino was there for all of the mistaken causes, they thought, with a technique purposely designed to inflame, to justify violence by the federal authorities. Some puzzled if Bovino had been despatched to Minnesota to spark a riot.
“They’re going to kill someone else,” a prosecutor on the decision stated later. Others agreed.
Asked by NCS concerning the name with prosecutors, Bovino stated he was centered on his mission of coping with the protests.
“I wasn’t mad. I was simply trying to get something done,” he stated. “Maybe I was a little intense — I hope I was — and I don’t think they liked that too much.”
Though he stated he didn’t recall his precise phrases, Bovino stated the concept of placing down the protests was not one thing he would say. As for the “chosen people” remark, Bovino denied it was meant to be antisemitic. He stated he was merely annoyed that Rosen had not been reachable on a Saturday, and that he wished somebody to “answer the goddamn phone.”
Tom Calhoun-Lopez, then the chief of the Violent and Major Crimes part for the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office, advised NCS that repeatedly, from the start of the Trump administration’s immigration surge in Minnesota, what the Justice Department advised his workplace to do was “antithetical to principles of law enforcement. I could not reconcile what I was being asked to do with my duty to the law and to the Constitution of the United States.”
“I was doing everything within my power to protect the rule of law in the context of the operation,” Calhoun-Lopez, a US Army veteran who had been a prosecutor for greater than 16 years, stated. “It soon became clear to me that it was not going to be possible for me to do so.”
(*2*)
ICE deployment appeared like ‘occupation,’ ex-prosecutor says
The day after the decision with Bovino, Tuesday, January 13, Calhoun-Lopez and 4 of the opposite prosecutors in the workplace resigned to protest what they seen as unethical, immoral habits and orders coming from the Trump Justice Department.
In addition to Calhoun-Lopez, resignations additionally got here from the second in command in the workplace, First Assistant Joe Thompson; Chief of the Criminal Division Harry Jacobs; former Criminal Chief and Counsel to the US Attorney Melinda Williams; and line prosecutor Ruth Shnider.
The blast zone continued past these 4: At least eight extra resignations from the workplace would comply with in the subsequent few weeks, together with Deputy Chief of each the Narcotics Division and Indian Country Allen Slaughter Jr. and line prosecutor Dan Bobier.
It was a comparatively small and tight-knit workplace, the place information traveled quick. Thompson recurrently briefed others on workers on issues of significance, particularly after the Good taking pictures.
In Washington, DC, 5 senior prosecutors with the Justice Department’s Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division left as properly, the Good case on the very least hastening the exits of a group that had concluded the Trump administration was corrupting the method.
The controversies have prolonged into this summer time. In latest days, ICE agents have fatally shot unarmed migrants in automobiles in Texas and Maine, and in each circumstances, the federal government’s preliminary accounts of the incidents have been referred to as into query.
In a press release in response to NCS’s questions for this story, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson stated: “The Trump administration remains committed to enforcing federal immigration law and all federal laws. That includes deporting illegal aliens who are unlawfully present in the country, as well as taking action against aliens engaging in fraud schemes and stealing from American taxpayers.”
In a separate assertion, a DHS spokesperson referred to as it “shameful” to recommend Border Patrol agents weren’t correctly ready to implement the regulation.
“Border Patrol agents are highly trained and required to meet the highest standards of professionalism and law enforcement capability. Many of our agents have backgrounds in the military or local law enforcement and Border Patrol agents receive extensive federal law enforcement training,” the spokesperson stated.
Before final fall, the workplace of Rosen — who personally was typically out of state, again at his house in Miami, Florida or along with his girlfriend in New Jersey — had respectable relations with the Justice Department, its prosecutors felt.
The quantity two in the workplace, First Assistant Thompson, had beforehand headed the Fraud Unit, which had been working laborious on high-profile prosecutions of dozens of individuals charged with stealing from Covid-era applications meant to assist these in want.
The March 2025 conviction of Aimee Bock — founding father of Feeding our Future — for masterminding the theft of $250 million from a program for hungry kids, was simply the most recent success in the workplace’s crackdown on billions of {dollars} of suspected fraud by dozens of Minnesotans, lots of them members of the Somali-American neighborhood.
The suggestions the workplace acquired from the Trump administration DOJ — particularly from the workplace of then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, in addition to Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh — was fairly optimistic. Officials appeared to love and belief Thompson, who served on the group of particular counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s mishandling of categorized materials.
The partnership between Minnesota and federal authorities was examined in 2025 with two native crimes that shocked the conscience. First, the horrific June shootings of state Rep. and former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, who had been killed, and Minnesota state Sen. John Hoffman and his spouse, Yvette, who had been wounded. Then, in August, a taking pictures at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that resulted in the murders of Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10.
As horrific because the crimes had been, the federal and native governments labored properly collectively in the investigations and subsequent prosecution of the Hortmans’ killer, the varsity shooter having died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Prosecutors had already needed to cope with conspiracy theories from the fever swamps in their earlier circumstances, such because the notion that Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz performed a job in Hortman’s dying.
Everything acquired worse, lots of the former prosecutors recall, after conservative influencers began concentrating on Minnesota on immigration issues.
On November 19, conservatives Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe of the Manhattan Institute, revealed a City Journal story titled, “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” referring to a terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda.
“There’s no indication that the defendants we charged were radicalized or seeking to fund Al-Shabaab or other terrorist groups,” Thompson advised reporters in response to queries. “Some money went to Somalia, indirectly some money might have gotten into the hands of Al-Shabaab, which controls significant parts of Somalia and imposes a tax there.” (Weeks later, a key supply for the City Journal story told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that the story was “bullshit” and stated he had been misquoted, although City Journal stood by its reporting.)
On November 21, President Donald Trump posted on social media that he was “terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota. Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from.”
Later that day, throughout the televised portion of his December 2 Cabinet assembly, Trump began speaking about “what is happening in Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes or however many lakes they have, they got a lot of lakes. But this beautiful place, and I see these people ripping it off.”
Operation Metro Surge started on December 1 and would finally convey greater than 3,000 agents to the Twin Cities.
By December 4, DHS was heralding a few of “the worst of the worst” prison undocumented immigrants whom its agents had captured: members of violent gangs, a person convicted of prison sexual conduct with a minor, people convicted of assault, theft, home violence, and extra.
But Minnesota citizens additionally started complaining that the ICE agents despatched to Minneapolis had been racially profiling native American citizens and behaving in unusually aggressive methods. In early December, video was posted by the Sahan Journal, an area publication for immigrants and communities of colour, of agents tackling, cuffing and arresting a person who stated he was an American citizen; and by Minnesota Public Radio of agents arresting a citizen observer.
“They were surging thousands of people they didn’t know without any planning,” recalled a prosecutor. “That caused a lot of chaos. It really got terrible. I think they were all trying to manage the White House, Trump’s desire for something.”
Conversations the US lawyer’s workplace prosecutors had with native DHS officers crammed them with dread once they heard a part of the Trump administration plan was to convey in Border Patrol agents, lots of whom had little to no expertise working in cities.
“From the beginning, DHS conducted the operation in a paramilitary posture,” Calhoun-Lopez advised NCS, referring to ICE and DHS agents who had “no familiarity with Minnesota or its communities … heavily armed and they patrolled in masks and in full combat gear. It had all the appearance and the mentality of a military occupation, and the ethos was they would subdue the state.”
Prosecutors, warned by HSI agents that Bovino and Border Patrol had been going to make issues even worse, tried to cease them from coming, reaching out to Justice Department officers in DC.
Bovino and Border Patrol got here anyway for what Bovino stated was meant to be a two-day operation that was prolonged after the taking pictures of Good.
“Commander Bovino’s public statements doubled down on the agents’ attitude that this was a paramilitary occupation,” Calhoun-Lopez stated, “and that the people of the state of Minnesota would be subdued and brought to heel. … The operation spiraled into chaos. Amidst the chaos came the tragic shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.”
Bovino dismissed the concept that his presence infected tensions in Minneapolis and different cities the place he was deployed. “What had inflamed the tensions had already occurred before we got there. So, if they say that, then they’re disingenuous at best and lying at worst,” he advised NCS.
Bovino was already an adjudicated liar. That didn’t appear to matter to the Trump administration.
In November, following a surge of immigration enforcement officers to Chicago for “Operation Midway Blitz” that resulted in a lawsuit in opposition to the federal government for extreme use of power, US District Judge Sara Ellis issued a 233-page ruling in opposition to Bovino, in addition to then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, then-acting director of ICE Todd Lyons, Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection Rodney S. Scott and others.
Accusing the defendants of “widespread misrepresentations,” Ellis singled out Bovino by stating “the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.” The decide famous that “Bovino admitted in his deposition that he lied multiple times about the events that occurred in Little Village that prompted him to throw tear gas at protesters.”
Weeks after this judgment got here down, with ample proof that Bovino had used and justified extreme power in opposition to US citizens and lied beneath oath about his causes for doing so, the Trump administration despatched him to Minnesota.
The morning of Wednesday, January 7, prosecutors in the US lawyer’s workplace heard concerning the taking pictures together with the remainder of the world. Texts, emails, calls got here in. The video posted on-line and have become viral, many members of the general public outraged.
A neighborhood lady, Renee Good, had dropped off her 6-year-old son at Southside Family Charter School in south Minneapolis, then she and her spouse, Becca Good, went to be “legal observers” of the immigration operations. She was shot in her Honda Pilot on Portland Avenue close to thirty fourth Street in south Minneapolis, in the Powderhorn neighborhood. It wasn’t one in all Bovino’s Border Patrol agents however an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross who killed Renee Good as she tried to drive away from him.
“Well that didn’t fucking take long,” one prosecutor stated to a colleague.
Based on the movies they’d seen, not one of many prosecutors NCS spoke to thought Ross’s taking pictures was “clean” and clearly justifiable. Some thought it was criminally prosecutable, significantly since he fired at her from her aspect window, when he was clearly not in the trail of the automobile, and was believed to have been the one who stated “fucking bitch” after she was shot.
Others felt that Ross would be capable to declare he thought he was beneath assault so it will be tough to prosecute — what some name “lawful but awful.”
The prevailing view in the US lawyer’s workplace, sources advised NCS, was that Good wasn’t making an attempt to hit Ross and that Ross didn’t have to shoot her. That stated, it wasn’t clear minimize provided that Ross would be capable to declare he feared for his life, and people circumstances in opposition to regulation enforcement officers are tough to prosecute.
Later, video would emerge of federal officers on the scene refusing to permit somebody who claimed to have medical experience entry to Good.
A person on the scene of Renee Good’s crashed automobile asks agents if he may verify for a pulse. He is advised no. “I’m a physician,” the person says.
“I don’t care,” responds an agent.
Prosecutors noticed that and thought of it one other potential prison act.
So they opened a civil rights investigation, which was customary protocol. No one knew the place it will land on the continuum of it being deemed justifiable to it being a prosecutable prison violation of somebody’s civil rights. Rosen thought Good had pushed her automobile into the agent, sources advised NCS. But he, too, wished an investigation.
Ever because the police homicide of George Floyd and the following unrest in 2020, the US lawyer’s workplace in Minnesota had taken the lead place in coordinating the whole-of-government response. Rosen was in Washington, DC, and would stay there that week. The process of operating the response fell in the lap of Thompson, who along with his group started coordinating with Mayor Jacob Frey; Walz; Drew Evans, the pinnacle of the BCA — the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which does these form of investigations at a state stage; the FBI; and DHS.
It was determined that the FBI and BCA would collectively examine the taking pictures, with the Minneapolis Police dealing with safety on the scene.
“We were worried that the city was going to burn down as it did after the murder of George Floyd,” recalled the second prosecutor.
Then-Minneapolis Police Department Chief Brian O’Hara was on the scene of the taking pictures, which was reassuring, however quickly got here phrase of a dispute, the place HSI agents had been arguing with MPD officers as to who would management the scene. Thompson feared the presence of ICE and Border Patrol agents, so he advised the federal officers on the Whipple Building to name the agents again.
But then every thing went mistaken.
Not even 5 hours after Good’s dying, Trump took to TruthSocial and made numerous demonstrably false claims concerning the incident, saying Good was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
Almost none of that was correct.
Similarly, at a information convention, Noem gave a false account, saying regulation enforcement officers had been trying to push out a car that was caught in snow “when a mob of agitators that were harassing them all day began blocking them in, shouting at them and impeding law enforcement operations.” In fact, the caught car was unrelated to Good’s blocking of the road.
“ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands,” Noem stated. In fact, Good had been getting contradictory details about whether or not she ought to transfer her automobile or get out of it.
“She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over,” Noem stated. “This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism. The ICE officer fearing for his life and the other officers around him and the safety of the public fired defensive shots.”
To prosecutors, it appeared that Good was making an attempt to drag away unaware that Ross was strolling in entrance of her automobile. Even if Ross had thought she was making an attempt to run him over, a beneficiant interpretation in the view of prosecutors, he fired upon her from the aspect of the automobile when he was out of any hazard.
Trump’s and Noem’s remarks had been unprecedented. There was no proof that advised she was a home terrorist. The President and the Secretary had been basically ruling the taking pictures justified earlier than there had been any investigation.
Trump administration officers advised NCS that there have been two causes for the aggressive, inaccurate responses from Noem and others in the administration. One, immigration agents on the bottom in each written and oral reviews had been offering false or deceptive info to them.
Second, White House officers — led by Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller — had already been pushing for the administration to extra aggressively label protesters “domestic terrorists.”
In the afternoon on the day of the Good taking pictures, BCA officers had been advised the plan had modified: The FBI would solely deal with the investigation. Local officers would haven’t any entry to proof or interviews or any case supplies.
For a quick interval, Trump administration officers advocated for the taking pictures to be investigated internally by DHS; basically the company would examine itself. In the top, officers determined to have the FBI work with DHS to research.
The lack of native involvement was a outstanding break from precedent.
The push to have DHS agents off the road was reversed as properly.
From the Trump administration’s perspective, any detente was ruined by Democrats, together with Walz, who stated the taking pictures was “the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV. And today that recklessness cost someone their life.”
Even much less circumspect had been the statements of Frey, who stated the evening of the Good taking pictures that citizens ought to “respond right now with our best versions of self” but in addition weighed in on what occurred earlier than any investigation had occurred.
“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Frey stated angrily. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly. That is bullshit. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.”
Angrily, Frey added that whereas there was little he may say “that’ll make this situation better,” he had a message for ICE: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here.”
In the US lawyer’s workplace, staffers grimaced. This wasn’t going to assist.
And quickly HSI officers referred to as the U.S. lawyer’s workplace and advised prosecutors the DHS agents had been ordered again into motion.
The message conveyed to them was that they needed to go to hockey rinks, they needed to go to colleges, they needed to go to probably the most sizzling button locations they might probably go. (The DHS spokesperson denied that immigration agents intentionally focused faculties.)
For these few hours, prosecutors held out hope that even in the midst of this chaos, they’d be allowed to do their jobs. But that modified after DHS agents had been despatched again into the road and BCA was prevented from investigating the taking pictures. The prosecutors started to fret that issues would escalate to the diploma that they’d possible should finally resign in protest.
Nonetheless, the US lawyer’s workplace moved forward with customary working process, opening an investigation as as to whether Renee Good’s civil rights had been violated — staffing it with profession prosecutors comparable to Ruth Shnider, pursuing search warrants for, say, Good’s automobile, and starting the method of figuring out witnesses to interview.
Rosen referred to as from DC and wasn’t enthusiastic concerning the investigation being predicated on Good’s rights being violated. He appeared to need an investigation completed, however not with any idea of Good as a sufferer. Prosecutors finally satisfied him that from a paperwork perspective, there wanted to be a predication.
Sources advised NCS that throughout the Trump administration there was a debate about whether or not each time an officer fires his gun in a questionable taking pictures the federal investigation must be into whether or not the civil rights of the sufferer had been violated.
From January 8 via January 13, the lead prosecutors in Minnesota discovered themselves pushing again because the Trump Justice Department — typically Singh and others in Blanche’s workplace, typically others in the highest ranges of the Justice Department and FBI — denied them the flexibility to conduct a standard investigation. Often the orders would come from high Justice Department officers on to the prosecutors, and Rosen, both in DC or along with his new spouse at her house in New Jersey, would name later and relay the identical message.
On Thursday the eighth, the prosecutors filed a warrant to look Good’s automobile to conduct a high-level forensic evaluation — taking a look at blood spatter and bullet trajectories and such. A decide signed off on it, however the FBI simply sat on it.
DOJ officers advised the prosecutors to claw the warrant again and exchange it with a brand new warrant for an investigation into Good as a home terrorist who was responsible of an AFO.
The grounds for the warrant weren’t significantly related, the prosecutors tried to elucidate to DOJ officers and Rosen. Moreover, any decide would certainly reject the request and even doubtlessly maintain them in contempt because the first warrant had already been signed.
Prosecutors feared that federal officers wished to grab Good’s automobile and hold it so they might stop a state investigation. DOJ denied that suggestion on the time.
To a few of the prosecutors, it started to sink in that their future in the U.S. lawyer’s workplace may quickly have to finish.
Rosen confirmed up again in the workplace Monday, January 12. He conveyed that “the marching orders were, ‘We’re going to investigate Renee Good for an assault of a federal officer, and we’re going to take some investigative steps with Good’s wife Becca, as well,’” in line with the primary prosecutor.
The prosecutors thought this was insanity. Not solely was there no proof, it didn’t make a lot sense to research a lifeless lady who may by no means be charged with something.
The Justice Department didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark for this story.
The Good household had secured an lawyer for a possible civil case in opposition to the federal government. The 4 high prosecutors engaged on the case — Thompson, Jacobs, Williams, and Calhoun-Lopez — started discussing with Rosen that possibly they had been conflicted out of taking any additional motion associated to the Good case as a result of they may be referred to as to be witnesses in any civil case Good’s household may convey. After all, they’d seen officers mendacity about what they’d been doing in the streets, they knew Bovino and Border Patrol’s presence had even Trump administration officers expressing fears that someone was going to lose their life, they usually had been on calls with Bovino the place he talked about placing down protests.
Perhaps it was pie in the sky that DOJ would finally settle for this argument, nevertheless it appeared a legitimate one: Becca Good would clearly sue and have a case that they’d all should testify in. Therefore, the prosecutors argued, they shouldn’t make any extra choices having to do with Becca.
It was additionally true that they hoped it may assist them simply quash the craziness for yet one more day.
Either means, it didn’t get a lot traction.
That similar day was when Bovino demanded a name with the workplace. The prosecutors weren’t taking over the circumstances he and his agents had been submitting relating to protestors placing arms on them.
Those circumstances had been going to Calhoun-Lopez, who had been predisposed to just accept the agents’ testimonies. “I respect good police work,” he advised NCS. “I think agents appreciated a prosecutor who understood them, who respected their job. And so, I tended to defend agents if they were in hot water, I stood up for them.”
But beginning with Operation Metro Surge, he realized the circumstances had been typically constructed on lies. “It was a shock to me to have agents lying to me. They were telling me that they had been pushed or shoved and I would accept it, and I would assign the case. And then defense lawyers or somebody would show me a video that showed it was not true.”
Beyond the mendacity of the agents, prosecutors had been shocked at a few of the surprising bodily behaviors of those agents. They had dropped at Rosen’s consideration movies of agents’ actions that wanted additional probing, what appeared to them like blatant civil rights violations.
Regardless, in Bovino’s earlier requested assembly with the U.S. lawyer’s workplace, he tore into them, together with his sneering comment about Rosen, who was not on the decision, being “one of the chosen people.”
After the decision, the prosecutors huddled. To some, it was a few of the most surprising old-school bigotry they’d ever heard from a regulation enforcement official.
“We’ve got to tell Danny right away,” one of many prosecutors stated.
Thompson, the appearing US lawyer for a lot of 2025, had been inspired by native officers in Minnesota to use for the everlasting job the yr earlier than, although Rosen finally had been picked. Many of the prosecutors in the workplace considered Rosen as jovial however not prepared to take a stand on something of significance. Prosecutors typically satisfaction themselves on standing up for what’s proper. To the prosecutors, Rosen didn’t appear to view the world that means. The prosecutors who labored beneath him thought that was antithetical to the job.
Still, Rosen appeared to care about points pertaining to antisemitism.
Prosecutors noticed this as Rosen’s alternative to name the Justice Department, name Bovino out on his obvious antisemitism and get him out of the town.
Rosen didn’t recommend to them that he was going to do this. He agreed what Bovino stated was dangerous however didn’t take any motion.
Rosen was fearful that the town was such a tinderbox, to inject antisemitism into the combo would solely damage the Jewish neighborhood. He would convey up the matter with Justice Department leaders after issues had calmed down a bit.
In totally different conferences all through that day and Tuesday, January 13, the 4 high prosecutors pushed again. They wouldn’t change the warrant, they usually wouldn’t order investigations of Renee and Becca Good.
It was morally bankrupt, one stated.
Well, should you’re not going to do it, discover somebody who will, Rosen advised them.
No, they stated.
They resigned.
Jacobs, then Thompson, then Williams, then Calhoun-Lopez. Then Shnider.
More than a half century of prosecutorial service to the nation, gone.
They wouldn’t be the final.
On Thursday, January 15, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News present and stated “What happened in Minnesota? We had six prosecutors who suddenly decided they didn’t want to support the men and women of ICE!”
“They wanted the taxpayers to pay for them to go on vacation because they decided they didn’t want to support law enforcement,” she stated. “So, the breaking news tonight? I fired them all. They are fired from the office.”
“I watched the attorney general on Fox change their resignations to terminations, and rips away their (health care) benefits,” remembers a prosecutor who resigned after the preliminary 5. “These were people who were beloved just a few days before. I realized very quickly that night that this was not the place I needed to be.”
In Washington, DC, the US Justice Department division that prosecutes regulation enforcement officers for prison and corrupt acts is the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division.
When Renee Good was shot and killed, the chief of the part was Jim Felte. His principal deputy chief was Paige Fitzgerald. Forrest Christian was a deputy chief in the Civil Rights Division, and Mary Hahn was one other lawyer in the part. Mark Blumberg was particular authorized counsel.
Following the Justice Department’s actions associated to the Good taking pictures, all 5 accelerated — or had been reassured about — their present plans to go away the administration.
The Justice Department claimed on the time that “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. Any suggestion to the contrary is false.”
That assertion isn’t totally true, nor does it have in mind the bigger — related — context. It is true that earlier than the Good taking pictures all 5 had been planning on leaving, and a few had begun making use of for the early retirement being provided to senior leaders. But that was instantly as a result of they had been all troubled by what appeared a transparent sample of the Trump administration on the very least ignoring and infrequently purposefully defending abuses by regulation enforcement officers.
But for a lot of of them, the mishandling of the Good taking pictures was, if not the ultimate straw, the ultimate kick out the door.
“I had felt since the summer that we were kind of willfully blind to the misconduct that was happening within DHS’s enforcement efforts,” stated Kyle Boynton, a trial lawyer in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division who had formally resigned in October however whose final day wasn’t till January 24.
Boynton was conscious of what was happening on the time, and he notes that two surprising actions by Justice Department superiors had already upended many years of precedent and precipitated the 5 prosecutors to think about leaving the Justice Department.
First: The July 2025 intervention by Trump DOJ appointee Robert Keenan to assist former Louisville police detective Brett Hankison, prosecuted and convicted in November 2024 of violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor for his position in firing into her condo. Keenan — joined by not one of the profession prosecutors from the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division — pushed for Hankison to solely obtain in the future in jail, which he’d already served. FBI agents in court docket opted to sit down with Breonna Taylor’s mom Tamika Palmer as an alternative of with Keenan. That transfer by Keenan “leveled” the profession prosecutors, sources advised NCS.
A decide overruled Keenan and sentenced Hankison to 33 months in jail.
Second: In November, simply days earlier than the trials of former Lawrence County, Tennessee, regulation enforcement officers Zach Ferguson and Eric Caperton, who had been charged with beating a 61-year-old man and trying to cowl it up, Keenan ordered {that a} movement be filed to dismiss the case. The counsel of report was not prepared to file the movement, so Blumberg did it to guard the lawyer.
Then got here the dying of Renee Good.
It rapidly grew to become obvious to the prosecutors that the Criminal Section wouldn’t be allowed to research the taking pictures, which was confirmed a couple of days later when Blanche introduced that there was “currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation.” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the Number 3 official in the division and a person who had served as senior counselor to Trump, gave the impression to be instantly concerned in the choice. Woodward was perceived throughout the division to typically oppose the prosecution of cops.
They all quickly left. Felte, Fitzgerald, Christian, Hahn and Blumberg. Among the 5 of them had been greater than 100 years of expertise in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division via a number of administrations, together with Trump’s first.
They didn’t go public for varied causes, they usually did so on totally different timelines, and with nuances, and sophisticated causes. Generally talking, they didn’t wish to immediate a backlash by the Trump administration in opposition to those that remained, who continued to attempt to prosecute these circumstances. They didn’t wish to appear all excessive and mighty, insulting those that stayed behind. They didn’t desire a public combat.
But their issues had been actual: Hankison, then Ferguson and Caperton, and at last Good.
The Trump administration “politicized the work of the Criminal Section. Administration after administration after administration understood the value and importance of having career people making the important case related decision on some of the most important — and sometimes divisive — cases that define our fundamental beliefs about equality and due process,” stated a bit lawyer. “That’s the big picture. They unilaterally broke the contract that we had with the public.”
Boynton, who served as a police officer in Charlottesville, Virginia, and an FBI agent for eight years, referred to as the Justice Department’s actions “a significant step backwards for police accountability.”
“The decision not to take any action after Renee Good was a sign that that aspect, that part of the mission of the criminal section was no more; that it had been jettisoned,” Boynton stated.
On Wednesday night, January 14, ICE agent Christian Castro was pursuing DoorDash driver Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna via Minneapolis.
Aljorna, a Venezuelan nationwide in the nation illegally, tried to flee by automobile after which, after crashing his car because of the icy avenue, by foot, according to his lawyer.
Castro grabbed Aljorna, who shed his jacket and continued to run away from him, terrified for his life, he later stated, due to the Good killing.
Aljorna tried to get into the condo of his cousin Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Castro fired his gun at each males, hitting Sosa-Celis in the leg.
The ICE officer claimed that the 2 males, and a 3rd, had attacked him and beat him with a brush and a shovel.
“DHS Releases More Details About the Three Violent Criminal Illegal Aliens Who Violently Beat a Law Enforcement Officer with Weapons,” proclaimed the DHS news release the subsequent day, describing the “three criminal illegal aliens who violently assaulted law enforcement with a shovel and broom handle in an attempt to evade arrest and obstruct law enforcement yesterday in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”
The information launch claimed that it was Sosa-Celis whom ICE had initially been pursuing and Sosa-Celis whom Castro tackled when “two subjects came out of a nearby apartment and attacked the law enforcement officer with a snow shovel and broom handle.”
Noem decried the boys for “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement. Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms. Fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot.”
The now-former prosecutors watched the case with curiosity. From expertise they’d seen so many agents mendacity. Over and over.
Given the astonishing charge of false testimony in prior circumstances, the workplace had determined to lift the requirements to convey prices. “We wanted bodycam and cell phone footage and everything else just to make a real charging decision,” the primary prosecutor stated.
That was the case right here, too.
Witness testimony and surveillance video confirmed no such assault had occurred. In February, Rosen was compelled to file a brief to dismiss with prejudice its grievance in opposition to Sosa-Celis and Aljorna. “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the Complaint Affidavit,” Rosen wrote. Castro would finally be charged with 4 counts of second-degree assault and one depend of falsely reporting a criminal offense.
On January 20, ICE agents positioned in custody Liam Conejo Ramos, who was 5 years previous, as they arrested his father. Both of them had entered the nation legally and had lively asylum claims.
With his blue knit bunny hat and spiderman backpack, the boy instantly became a symbol of Trump administration excesses and heartlessness.
Multiple adults had provided to take Liam into custody, however ICE agents claimed he had been deserted, a press release contradicted by many witnesses. The five-year-old was held along with his father in custody in Texas till the subsequent month, when a decide ordered him again to Minnesota.
The Trump administration’s lies and bellicosity had been happening for nearly two full months when, on Saturday, January 24, Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez shot Alex Pretti, a Department of Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse, not less than 10 occasions, killing him on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis.
Eleven days earlier, Pretti had been involved in a confrontation with immigration agents and was seen on video kicking the taillight of a federal car.
On this Saturday, he was filming agents along with his cellphone as a conflict between immigration agents and observers escalated, and Pretti stepped in entrance of an agent who had simply shoved a lady.
The agents sprayed him with pepper spray and wrestled him to the bottom. He had a hid weapon allow, and a firearm, however his gun was holstered and had been taken from him by immigration enforcement agents earlier than they fired their first shot at him. He was surrounded by six agents. He didn’t resist arrest in any respect or behave violently.
The script was now set.
On social media, White House aide Stephen Miller referred to as Pretti a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.”
There was no proof of that. None.
Noem’s description of the occasions didn’t remotely line up; she accused Pretti of “violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence.” She stated “that is the definition of domestic terrorism.”
There is not any proof that Pretti was a home terrorist. Noem particularly, falsely accused Pretti of getting been “brandishing a weapon.”
She had gotten that info from agents on the bottom, sources advised NCS. They had been mendacity. So she repeated their lies.
A spokesperson for Noem didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.
The taking pictures of Pretti was extensively seen by prosecutors as “bad.”
Prosecutors noticed the case as a slam dunk.
The Justice Department says the taking pictures continues to be being investigated collectively by DHS and the FBI. But the truth that no prices have been filed in six months is seen by the previous prosecutors as outrageous.
“It was an execution,” a 3rd prosecutor advised NCS. “It was a summary execution. And it is that simple.”
State investigators and officers had been prohibited from the crime scene.
It was greater than two weeks later, February 13, when the FBI advised BCA they’d not have any entry to the proof from that taking pictures as properly.
The state sued, nevertheless it wasn’t till a couple of days in the past that the Hennepin County Attorney stated she had managed to safe proof for an area investigation.
To Calhoun-Lopez, the administration’s lies had been the via line for all the tragic saga.
“I think when a government abandons its commitment to the truth,” he stated, “that breeds lawlessness and lawlessness necessarily leads to chaos.”