Minnesota Sues DOJ For Hiding Evidence In ICE Shootings
Three shootings. Two deaths. One federal government that seized all the evidence and refuses to give it back.
“We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche assured Fox News. “And that is not the case here. So, no, we are not investigating.”
Millions of people had just watched ICE Agent Jonathan Ross shout “Fucking bitch!” as he shot Minnesota poet Renee Good through the drivers’ side window of her car when the president’s former criminal lawyer said there was nothing to see here, folks. But that didn’t mean the feds were going to step back and let Minnesota law enforcement do their jobs. The FBI had seized all the evidence, and it wasn’t about to give it back.
Just four days later, immigration agents shot Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, whom the DOJ initially charged with attacking the agent who shot him, only to drop the case because the agents’ sworn statements were “materially inconsistent” with what had actually happened. Then agents wrestled ICU nurse Alex Pretti to the ground and shot him in the back. In both cases, the FBI excluded the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) from the scene, seized all the evidence, and refused to allow state officials to access it.
Now the state attorney general, along with the Hennepin County Attorney and the BCA, are suing to force the federal government to hand it over.
Crime wave
On the morning of January 7, Renee Good and her wife Becca were driving home from school drop off when they came upon ICE in their Minneapolis neighborhood. They stopped the car to record, and angry agents gave conflicting instructions — one ordered them to drive away, while another tried to open the door to their minivan. As Good was attempting to leave, Ross shot her three times through the front and driver’s side window.
The FBI’s Minneapolis field office and the US Attorney’s Office for Minnesota agreed to conduct a joint investigation with BCA. But within hours, DHS officials were calling Good a “domestic terrorist” and insisting that she’d tried to run Ross over. Trump even implied that Ross was in the hospital, despite multiple recordings showing him walking around unharmed after firing his gun. That evening, the DOJ informed the BCA superintendent there would be no joint investigation and no evidence sharing. Good’s car was taken into FBI custody, where it remains shrink-wrapped and unprocessed to this day.
This is very much not normal. In any prior administration, the Justice Department and Homeland Security would have immediately launched civil rights and after-action investigations in conjunction with local law enforcement. Weeks later, Deputy AG Blanche conceded as much when he grudgingly agreed to begin an investigation into the Pretti shooting, noting that “The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has the best experts in the world at this. They’ve been doing it for decades and and so I expect that that investigation will will proceed with that with those parameters in mind.” (That investigation appears to have come to nothing.)
