Mother Jones illustration; Peng Ziyang/Xinhua/Zuma, Sue Dorfman/Zuma
More federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned or are preparing to do so, in part because the Trump administration has asked them to file criminal charges against anti-ICE protesters without appropriate evidence, according to multiple people with knowledge of the situation.
The prosecutors, at the US Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, have been deluged with allegations of protesters assaulting Homeland Security agents. The administration is pressuring them to file charges even when agents have not turned over body-cam footage to support the charges, and when information exists to suggest the officer may have assaulted the protester first, according to the sources, who declined to be named for fear of retribution. “That’s historically not how we do things,” one told me. Traditionally, “you see the evidence first and then decide what to charge; you don’t charge and then see the evidence. It’s a horrible way of doing business.”
Many of the office’s criminal prosecutors walked out of a meeting with US Attorney Daniel Rosen “feeling demoralized and pissed.”
On Friday, the Justice Department announced that former CNN anchor Don Lemon and three others had been arrested for allegedly violating federal law during a protest at a church in St. Paul this month. The day before, US Attorney Daniel Rosen, who leads the Minnesota office, announced that 16 protesters had been charged with assaulting federal officers and federal property. The office’s attorneys are also being asked to focus on cases that accuse activist groups of conspiring to impede the work of immigration agents, my sources said.
What’s more, my sources told me, the office has not opened a single case against any immigration officer in the Twin Cities since the federal surge began in December, despite a proliferation of videos that show agents dragging people from their cars, pepper-spraying individuals in the face at close range, beating protesters, and, of course, killing two people.
A group of attorneys from the office’s criminal division met with Rosen earlier this week to express their concerns, particularly about the Justice Department’s lack of a civil rights investigation into the Border Patrol officers who killed Alex Pretti on January 24—instead, the Department of Homeland Security was given the green light to investigate itself. Attorneys were visibly upset after the meeting; some could be seen crying, according to a person familiar with the situation.
It was highly unusual for the Justice Department to be sidelined in such an investigation. “There’s certainly no indication from DHS that they are going to do it in a fair, aggressive, and just manner,” another person told me.
Many prosecutors walked out of the meeting with Rosen “feeling demoralized and pissed,” the source added. “The people who work there really care about doing the right thing, and they really care about justice. When there’s a very clear nonrecognition of that, that’s gut-wrenching. And they are tired. And it compounds the fact that many of them are Minneapolis residents whose neighbors are hiding out.”
In the videos, Pretti, an ICU nurse, appeared to be directing traffic and recording federal agents on his phone in Minneapolis before he was pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground by multiple agents. Footage of the encounter shows he was shot repeatedly as officers restrained him. Pretti possessed a legal firearm, which DHS officials misleading implied he’d brandished at the agents, though the video evidence clearly contradicts that suggestion. Pretti kept his gun holstered and out of sight—and he never reached for it. It also appears that one of the agents confiscated the gun before Pretti was shot.
On Friday, the Trump administration seemed to reverse course: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the Justice Department would step in and investigate Pretti’s killing. But Blanche included a caveat: “I don’t want to overstate what is happening,” he told reporters. “I don’t want the takeaway to be there is some massive civil rights investigation. I would describe it as a standard investigation by the FBI.”
The announcement may be too little, too late. “It’s better than no investigation, but I still have reservations about how it will be handled,” one of my sources said. “That should have been such an obvious decision, so it feels weird celebrating it as a win. And it doesn’t address the broader concern about selective prosecutions more generally.”
“It will feel like window dressing until it’s evident they’ve put experienced unbiased attorneys on the matter, and I’m just not sure there are any left at the Civil Rights Division at main Justice to do that,” noted another source. “There’s such a loss of trust with DOJ’s actions that DOJ doing now what seems to be the right thing—or half the right thing—just doesn’t go very far in my mind.”
“Virtually all the other work has essentially stopped or slowed so dramatically.”
The myriad frustrations of the staffers at the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office has fueled a new wave of departures from an office that was already hemorrhaging personnel. At least five attorneys, including the office’s second-in-command, Joseph Thompson, had resigned on January 13, less than a week after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good and the Justice Department ordered the office to investigate Good’s wife rather than focus on the shooter.
Another seven staffers have since resigned or have notified the office of their intention to do so, according to a source with knowledge of the departures. Six are prosecutors—including a senior litigation counsel in the criminal division, the deputy chief of narcotics cases in Indian Country, and the chief of the office’s civil section. The seventh was a victim witness coordinator. Yet more resignations are expected. Other staffers are retiring sooner than planned.
Five senior prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in DC—a unit that investigates police killings—also resigned shortly after Good was killed. “It’s a big deal, and this is fairly unprecedented,” Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor now based in Los Angeles, told me after the first wave of resignations. “You have so many leaving, and frankly on principle: We are living in unique times where prosecutors are being asked to do things they’ve never had to do before. That’s not what they signed up for.”
The Minnesota US Attorney’s Office had experienced some departures in the final months of the Biden administration. But since Trump got reelected, more than 50 out of about 135 staffers have left. The office had fewer than 30 prosecutors prior to the latest wave of resignations, less than half of the proper head count, according to Anders Folk, a former acting US attorney in Minnesota, who left in 2021.
“We are down to a skeleton crew,” one source told me.
The remaining attorneys have resisted the Justice Department directive to focus on Good’s wife, one of my sources said. Still, they are so flooded with cases related to the immigration enforcement surge that they have had almost no time to handle other cases, including long-term investigations into drug trafficking, gang violence, child abuse, and crimes on Native American reservations.
“Virtually all the other work has essentially stopped or slowed so dramatically,” another source confirmed. Attorneys in the criminal unit have been instructed to resolve those other cases as quickly as possible—including by proffering lenient plea deals they wouldn’t have considered before.
Ironically, prosecutors have even had to slow-roll the sprawling fraud investigation that the Trump administration used as pretext to send a surge of federal officers to the Twin Cities. Thompson, the office’s second-in-command, was overseeing that investigation when he resigned.
Immigration officers have reportedly arrested about 3,000 people locally since Operation Metro Surge launched. Now the administration is sending reinforcements to help with the US Attorney’s Office caseload, including assistant US attorneys from other districts and military attorneys known as Judge Advocates General (JAGs). But the pace is relentless, and the office has lost seasoned prosecutors with decades of institutional knowledge.
Many prosecutors are still exercising their discretion and, despite the pressure, are not charging protesters without sufficient evidence of a criminal violation. But one source I spoke with worried that, as more senior attorneys bail out, cases will be left to relatively inexperienced temporary and junior attorneys who may be more vulnerable to pressure from above.
“They may be phenomenal people,” the source said, “but they don’t have the judgment or the ability to stand up to a senior agency head in a meeting; they’re probably going to file the complaint, when a more experienced senior person would say no.”
