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- The Civil Rights Division’s Role
- How These Investigations Normally Work
- The Decision-Making Hierarchy
- What Didn’t Happen This Time
- What the Resignations Signaled
- Historical Practice Across Administrations
- Prosecutorial Discretion vs. Institutional Procedure
- Implications for Future Federal Shooting Investigations
- Why Procedure Matters
On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good during an immigration operation in Minneapolis. Within days, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced there was “currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation”—stopping any investigation before it could begin.
At least four senior prosecutors from the Civil Rights Division resigned in the immediate aftermath of the decision, followed by six federal prosecutors in Minnesota. What they were protesting wasn’t a prosecutorial decision. It was the dismantling of the process that’s supposed to produce that decision.
The Civil Rights Division’s Role
The Civil Rights Division exists to prosecute government officials who abuse their power. Unlike every other part of DOJ—which handles crimes committed by regular people—this division investigates crimes committed by people with badges.
The legal tool they use is a federal law from after the Civil War, originally written to stop Southern officials from terrorizing freed slaves. Today, it’s the federal government’s primary mechanism for holding law enforcement accountable when they kill someone through illegal arrest or use of force or by violating the right to fair legal procedures.
State authorities were blocked from their typical investigative role, with the federal government asserting primacy over federal personnel acting in their official capacity. If the Civil Rights Division doesn’t investigate, nobody with prosecutorial power is evaluating whether the shooting was constitutional. The division serves as the federal government’s internal check on its own agents.
How These Investigations Normally Work
The process starts with notification. When a federal agent fires their weapon and someone dies, the Civil Rights Division learns about it through multiple channels simultaneously. Direct notification from the agency, alerts from the FBI, local law enforcement reports, media coverage.
Career prosecutors in the Criminal Section—attorneys who specialize in this kind of case—review whatever evidence is immediately available. Bystander video. The initial incident report. Witness statements. They’re determining whether the preliminary facts suggest a potential constitutional violation worth investigating.
The threshold for opening an investigation is deliberately low. Prosecutors regularly open investigations in cases where they ultimately decide not to file charges. The investigation is how you figure out what happened.
Once an investigation opens, the Civil Rights Division coordinates with the FBI to preserve evidence: the weapon, ballistics analysis, the vehicle involved, all video footage, witness statements. Multiple prosecutors get assigned to the case, often mixing senior attorneys with experience in federal shootings and younger prosecutors learning the work.
The FBI arranges forensic analysis. Medical examiner findings about wound location and severity. Ballistics showing trajectory and number of shots. Scene reconstruction. Sometimes they bring in use-of-force experts—retired law enforcement with specialized training—to assess whether the tactical decisions aligned with professional standards.
FBI agents, under direction from Civil Rights Division prosecutors, conduct detailed witness interviews. Other personnel present. Civilians who saw what happened. Emergency responders. Sometimes family members of the deceased. These interviews get recorded or documented in written reports, creating a documentary record that can be examined for consistency and credibility.
The timeline varies. Cases with clear video evidence move faster. Complex factual disputes take longer. But we’re talking months, not days.
The final prosecutorial decision—whether to seek indictment or decline prosecution—rests with the Civil Rights Division. In high-profile cases, it might involve the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights or even the Deputy Attorney General. But career prosecutors who specialize in these cases make these determinations, not political appointees bypassing the experts.
The Decision-Making Hierarchy
In a typical federal shooting, the initial assessment comes from career prosecutors in the Criminal Section. These are attorneys who’ve made this their specialty, who understand the complexities of prosecution, who’ve evaluated dozens of use-of-force cases. If they recommend opening an investigation, that recommendation goes to the section chief—a political appointee selected by the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
The Assistant Attorney General has ultimate authority over the division’s priorities. But in routine cases, they defer to the judgment of career prosecutors unless something unusual demands higher-level intervention.
The Deputy Attorney General—the second-highest-ranking official in the entire Justice Department—getting involved in whether to open a specific investigation is unusual. That level of intervention normally happens only in the most politically sensitive cases or when there’s an explicit policy decision requiring department-wide consistency.
In the Good case, Todd Blanche made the determination without a preliminary investigation. Career prosecutors made no recommendation. Instead of investigating prosecutors recommending a course of action to higher-level appointees, the highest-level appointee determined the course of action without involving investigating prosecutors.
What Didn’t Happen This Time
No preliminary investigation occurred before the decision to decline a review. In normal circumstances, career prosecutors would have reviewed preliminary incident reports before making a recommendation. This review can happen in days.
Second: the Criminal Section wasn’t consulted in any meaningful way. Justice Department officials said the division was told about the decision after it was made, but there’s no indication career prosecutors were asked to provide an initial assessment or recommendation. The specialized section that exists to evaluate these cases was bypassed entirely.
Federal investigators examined Renee Good’s potential activist connections, and prosecutors were asked to investigate Good’s widow, rather than focusing the investigation on the ICE agent who pulled the trigger. The mandate is to investigate government actors for constitutional violations. Investigating citizens for their political associations falls outside that domain entirely.
The standard coordination between the division and FBI didn’t materialize. While the FBI opened an investigation, the Criminal Section was excluded from directing or meaningfully participating. Federal shooting investigations involve close coordination, with prosecutors working alongside FBI agents to shape investigative direction and ensure evidence relevant to constitutional violations gets properly preserved.
The Trump administration explicitly blocked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from investigating and withheld evidence from state prosecutors. Recent practice has involved joint federal-state investigation of high-profile incidents, with agencies sharing evidence and findings. That coordination was deliberately prevented here.
What the Resignations Signaled
The Justice Department’s official position was that the prosecutors had already been planning to retire and the timing was coincidental. That is hard to believe when four senior prosecutors and six Minnesota federal prosecutors all accelerate their departures in the same week.
They were objecting to the institutional process that produced that decision. They were signaling that the procedures established to ensure federal shootings receive expert review by specialized prosecutors had been overridden.
One resignation carried particular weight: First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson, who’d built the federal fraud cases the Trump administration cited to justify the immigration surge in Minnesota. As the Minneapolis Police Chief noted, losing the leading fraud prosecutor at the exact moment the administration was using fraud prosecution as justification for immigration operations suggested political priorities, not fraud concerns, were driving decisions.
These were seasoned federal prosecutors whose resignations would have material consequences for ongoing cases and institutional functioning. They quit anyway.
Historical Practice Across Administrations
The Biden administration’s Civil Rights Division appears to have dismissed some police investigations rather than actively pursuing all federal use-of-force incidents. However, the division maintained the basic institutional practice of conducting preliminary reviews and investigations in cases involving federal personnel and deadly force, rather than declining investigation at the outset.
The pattern across administrations, despite different political orientations, was consistent: when federal personnel used deadly force, the division investigated. The investigation didn’t automatically result in prosecution. Career prosecutors weighed difficult questions about constitutional violations, a legal protection that shields personnel from lawsuits in many situations, and evidentiary strength. But the investigation occurred.
This historical pattern establishes an institutional baseline. Whatever legitimate room for debate exists about evidence and constitutional law, the normal practice has been to investigate federal shootings rather than decline investigation at the preliminary stage, before any investigative work had been done.
Prosecutorial Discretion vs. Institutional Procedure
Prosecutors enjoy broad discretion not to prosecute cases, and courts have long held that prosecutorial decisions about whether to bring charges are generally unreviewable. This applies even to decisions that seem politically motivated or depart from established practice, as long as there’s no explicit evidence of discrimination based on protected class status.
The decision not to prosecute the ICE agent, even if made at an unusually high level, arguably falls under prosecutorial discretion. Todd Blanche had the power, in a formal legal sense, to determine insufficient evidence existed. No court would likely overturn such a decision.
But prosecutorial discretion and institutional procedure aren’t the same thing.
Even if Blanche had legal authority to decline prosecution, normal departmental procedure would have involved consulting with the division, allowing career prosecutors to conduct a preliminary investigation, and permitting the division’s leadership to make a reasoned recommendation. The deviation from these procedures—distinct from the substantive decision about prosecution—is what prompted the resignations and what legal analysts characterized as unusual.
In an institution like the Justice Department, which explicitly positions itself as neutral and apolitical, following normal procedures is how institutions prove they’re fair. When high-level political appointees bypass career prosecutors who specialize in particular legal domains and make determinations about whether to investigate allegations of government abuse of power, people won’t believe the department is fair and neutral.
The resignations were effectively a statement that the department’s institutional credibility had been damaged by the normal process being reversed, even if the substance of Blanche’s decision was under his formal legal authority.
Implications for Future Federal Shooting Investigations
The Good case establishes a concerning precedent. If Deputy Attorney General-level officials can bypass the division and decline investigation of federal shootings without preliminary inquiry, then the institutional check on federal law enforcement misconduct becomes substantially weaker.
Federal personnel facing investigations for use-of-force incidents now operate under different accountability structures depending on who the investigating prosecutor is and what priority levels in the Justice Department assign to the case. If the normal investigative role can be preempted, the outcome may depend more on political priorities than legal analysis of evidence.
The exclusion of state authorities becomes easier to justify when the federal investigation is restricted in scope. Minnesota argued it retained jurisdiction to investigate whether state laws were violated during the Good shooting. The Trump administration’s response was that the federal government was handling the investigation. But if the federal investigation is constrained and focused on matters other than the use of force, state authorities’ ability to conduct parallel investigations becomes necessary. The precedent here—that the division need not investigate federal shootings—may strengthen federal claims that state authorities should be excluded, even where state laws may have been violated.
The departure of experienced career prosecutors represents a loss of institutional expertise in federal misconduct cases. Prosecutors who spent decades developing expertise in these prosecutions, who understand the forensic and legal complexities of use-of-force cases, who have institutional relationships with law enforcement agencies—they’ve been replaced by officials recruited more recently. The resulting loss of specialized knowledge may make it harder to investigate federal shootings even if institutional commitment to such investigations is restored in the future.
Why Procedure Matters
The Renee Good case illustrates something often overlooked in discussions of government power: procedure matters, especially in institutions designed to check government misconduct.
Normal investigative procedures for federal shootings exist because those procedures represent a mechanism through which the federal government attempts to police itself when federal personnel use potentially illegal force.
When Blanche announced there was “no basis for a criminal investigation,” he exercised prosecutorial discretion that was, in a formal legal sense, under his authority. But in doing so without the preliminary investigation that normally precedes such determinations, without consultation with specialized prosecutors who have expertise in these cases, and without allowing the institutional process to function as designed, he signaled a change in how the Justice Department allocates power to investigate federal law enforcement misconduct.
The career prosecutors who resigned understood that if those procedures could be bypassed in this case, they could be bypassed in future cases, reducing the meaningful accountability available for federal law enforcement misconduct. They were signaling that the institutional baseline for federal shooting investigations had shifted.
Whether future administrations restore the division to its normal investigative role, or whether the precedent of Deputy Attorney General-level intervention and exclusion becomes normalized, remains to be seen. What’s clear is that the standard has changed, and that change carries implications for federal law enforcement accountability and the principle that government actors should be subject to the same legal constraints as ordinary citizens.
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