When DOJ Won’t Prosecute, Can Families Sue Federal Officers?

Last updated 3 months ago. Our resources are updated regularly but please keep in mind that links, programs, policies, and contact information do change.

On January 8, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. Last week, the Department of Justice announced it would not investigate. No criminal investigation into violations of people’s constitutional rights. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a brief statement saying there was not enough evidence to move forward—a phrase that raised more questions than it answered, particularly since the DOJ simultaneously directed investigators to examine Good’s widow for “possible connections to activist groups.”

When federal prosecutors won’t act, families can still sue. The question is whether litigation can work, what barriers stand in the way, and what families can realistically expect to achieve.

Civil Litigation as an Alternative to Criminal Prosecution

For decades, the Civil Rights Section investigated whenever federal law enforcement fatally shot someone. Not every investigation led to charges—most didn’t—but the principle was that the Justice Department had a responsibility to examine whether the officer broke laws protecting people’s rights.

That practice is over. Blanche’s statement provided no analysis of the facts, no explanation of what legal standard the case failed to meet, no indication that anyone had reviewed the evidence. Experienced prosecutors in the Civil Rights Division were told weeks before the incident that they wouldn’t participate in any investigation—a pre-planned exclusion that suggested this was about policy, not the merits of any particular case.

The DOJ’s decision not to prosecute is final for criminal cases. Only the federal government can prosecute federal violations of people’s constitutional rights. But civil claims operate independently. State wrongful death law doesn’t evaporate because federal prosecutors decline to act. A federal law still lets families sue the United States for wrongful acts federal employees committed while doing their job. Constitutional claims against individual officers—though substantially narrowed by recent Supreme Court decisions—haven’t been eliminated entirely.

The Federal Tort Claims Act

Most families who sue over federal officer misconduct use the Federal Tort Claims Act. The statute lets you sue the United States—not the officer personally—for wrongful acts federal employees committed while doing their job. Wrongful death. Battery. Assault. False imprisonment. The claims arise under state law, but you file them in federal court, and the defendant is always “the United States of America.”

You have two years from the incident to file an administrative claim—a specific government form—with the agency, describing what happened and what damages you’re seeking. Miss that deadline and you’re done. The agency then has six months to respond. If they deny the claim or ignore it, you have another six months to file a lawsuit in federal court. These are hard deadlines courts must follow.

The FTCA covers wrongful acts that state law recognizes, so you’re not limited to constitutional violations. Minnesota’s wrongful death statute would let the Good family argue that Ross negligently or recklessly caused Renee’s death—a different standard than proving a constitutional violation, and one that operates under a lower standard of proof than criminal cases require.

But the limitations are real. You can recover for loss of companionship, future earnings, medical expenses, funeral costs—but not damages designed to punish egregious conduct or deter future misconduct. The statute also contains exceptions that can swallow entire categories of claims. An exception for policy decisions protects the government from liability for judgment calls. A rule limits when you can sue for certain investigative actions.

Even if you sue the individual officer, the government can use a legal rule to replace the officer with itself as defendant and dismiss the officer from the case entirely. This can be strategically useful—the federal government has deeper pockets than any individual—but it also means you lose the opportunity to hold that specific person accountable in any public way.

Constitutional Claims Against Individual Officers

The alternative is suing the officer directly for violating constitutional protections. In 1971, a Supreme Court case created the right to sue federal officers personally for monetary damages when those officers violated their constitutional protections, even without a statute explicitly authorizing such suits. For decades, lawsuits against individual federal officers for violating constitutional rights were the primary mechanism for litigation against federal law enforcement.

Then the Supreme Court started narrowing them. A 2022 Supreme Court decision made it much harder to sue federal officers. Courts shouldn’t recognize such claims in new contexts unless Congress hasn’t had the opportunity to legislate on the topic and allowing the suit wouldn’t intrude on executive authority. Courts have increasingly found that immigration, border, and national security cases have different rules that make lawsuits harder—even when the underlying conduct looks identical to conduct that would support such a claim in a different setting.

For the Good family, such a claim would argue that Ross violated the constitutional right not to be grabbed or shot without good reason or the constitutional right to fair treatment by the government. The video evidence—showing Good attempting to steer away from Ross rather than toward him—would be central to establishing that she wasn’t posing an imminent threat and that deadly force was therefore unreasonable.

But Ross would invoke a legal protection that shields officers from lawsuits unless their actions clearly violated established rights. Even if his conduct violated her protections, he’d argue those protections weren’t established by a previous court case that had already ruled that nearly identical conduct was illegal. This protection doesn’t shield officers who make reasonable mistakes—it protects them unless prior cases with nearly identical facts had already ruled that such conduct was unconstitutional. Courts have granted this protection even when officers engaged in obviously wrong conduct, simply because the precise scenario hadn’t been litigated before.

Such claims offer something FTCA claims don’t: the possibility of punitive damages against the individual officer, and evidence the family can force the government to share that might reveal patterns of misconduct. Training failures. Policy violations. Prior incidents. The kind of evidence that shows this wasn’t an isolated mistake but part of a broader pattern.

State Wrongful Death Claims

Minnesota has a wrongful death statute. It lets family members sue anyone—state residents, corporations, federal officers—when negligent or intentional conduct causes a death. Unlike FTCA claims with their federal procedural requirements, state wrongful death claims operate under state law and can be filed in state court.

In practice, federal defendants typically remove state court cases to federal court, then argue that state law claims against federal employees should be treated as federal claims instead. Which brings you right back to the rule that you generally can’t sue the federal government and federal procedural requirements, including that two-year administrative claim deadline.

But something is happening at the state level. California and New York have both passed legislation explicitly authorizing suits against federal officers for constitutional violations. California’s bill would let Californians bring state-level actions against federal officers who violate state or federal constitutional protections, using the same standards already applicable to state and local law enforcement. These state laws represent a strategic response to the narrowing of constitutional claims and the DOJ’s abandonment of accountability. If federal law won’t hold federal officers accountable, states will create their own frameworks. Whether these laws survive constitutional challenges remains to be seen.

What Discovery Can Reveal

Here’s what makes litigation different from prosecution: families can compel the government to produce evidence it would rather keep hidden. In prosecutions, the DOJ controls everything. What to investigate. What to preserve. What to share publicly. The government can decline to pursue certain angles, hide evidence by claiming it’s protected, issue reports that remain sealed. Families have no say in any of it.

Civil lawsuits give families more power. Families’ attorneys can question under oath the officer, the supervisors who approved his deployment, the trainers who instructed him on use of force, any witnesses to the incident. They can ask direct questions about decision-making, training, understanding of policy, perception of threat. They can demand internal ICE documents: use of force policies, training materials, prior incident reports, inquiries into officer misconduct, any prior complaints against Ross.

This is often where cases find their strongest evidence. Not in the incident itself, but in what came before. The pattern of prior incidents that supervisors ignored. The training that was never provided. The policies that encouraged aggressive tactics. The complaints that were buried. The Good family could ask: What’s the policy on cooperating with state investigators? Has this policy been followed in other cases? Who decided to block Minnesota authorities? On what basis? Those questions might not lead to charges. But they could expose institutional patterns that make liability more likely and that create public accountability even if the case settles.

Qualified Immunity as a Barrier

The biggest barrier to litigation is a legal protection that shields officers from lawsuits. This protection shields government officials from personal liability unless they violated a right that previous court cases had already protected. The burden falls on families to show that at the time of the incident, it was clearly established law that the specific conduct violated constitutional protections. Not that the conduct was wrong. That it was clearly established as wrong by prior case law addressing similar circumstances.

In the Good case, the family would argue that a Supreme Court case ruled that deadly force can’t be used against a fleeing person unless the officer has probable cause to believe the person poses an immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm. If video shows Good attempting to drive away—not toward Ross—that should establish the use of force was unreasonable. But officers claim they perceived a threat even when video suggests otherwise. They argue the situation was more complex than it appears. They point to split-second decision-making under pressure. And courts often accept these arguments, finding that even if the conduct was wrong, it wasn’t clearly wrong in a way that prior cases had specifically addressed. Families can lose even when the evidence strongly suggests the officer acted unreasonably. Not because the conduct was justified, but because no prior case with sufficiently similar facts had ruled it unconstitutional.

What Success Looks Like

Litigation is expensive. Attorneys typically work on contingency fee arrangements where lawyers only get paid if they win, taking a percentage of any recovery rather than hourly fees. But such arrangements only make sense if the attorney believes the case has a reasonable prospect of success and potential recovery large enough to justify months or years of work. The timeline can stretch for years. From administrative claim to resolution, cases often take three to five years or more.

Even if they win, what does success look like? Financial recovery that comes from federal funds, not from the officer personally. A settlement that likely includes rules preventing them from talking about the settlement. No accountability through prosecution. No guarantee that ICE will change its policies or training. No public acknowledgment that the incident was wrong. A recent $24 million wrongful death settlement in an unrelated motor vehicle case suggests that when evidence of negligence or recklessness is clear, substantial damages are possible. Financial recovery can provide resources for families in the aftermath of loss. Discovery can expose patterns that create public accountability even without a trial. The process itself can validate that what happened was wrong, even if no one faces prosecution.

The Practical Decision Families Face

For the Good family, the decision about whether to pursue litigation involves multiple considerations. They have two years from Renee’s death to file an administrative claim with DHS. Miss that deadline and the FTCA pathway closes permanently. That clock is already running.

Second: legal strategy. Which combination of FTCA claims, potential constitutional claims, and state law claims remains viable under current law? Can the legal protection for officers be overcome given the video evidence? Are there patterns of similar conduct discoverable through early work? These questions require expert legal analysis from attorneys experienced in suing the federal government.

Third: goals. What does the family hope to achieve? If the primary goal is punishing Ross personally, litigation may disappoint—he’ll likely be dismissed from the case, and any recovery comes from federal funds. If the goal is exposing patterns of misconduct and creating public accountability, discovery might achieve that even if recovery is limited. If the goal is obtaining resources to support the family, recovery may be necessary regardless of its accountability functions.

Fourth: emotional cost. Litigation means years of engagement with the legal system, repeated depositions and court appearances, constant reminders of loss. Some families find this process cathartic—a way to fight back and seek justice when prosecution has been foreclosed. Others find it retraumatizing.

When Federal Accountability Mechanisms Fail

The DOJ declined to investigate the officer who shot Renee Good while simultaneously examining her widow for “possible connections to activist groups.” The Civil Rights Division—historically the institutional check on federal misconduct—was explicitly excluded from the work before it even began. Minnesota tried to investigate and was blocked. Prosecution is foreclosed. Federal accountability mechanisms have been abandoned.

What remains is litigation. A mechanism that has historically been far less successful at holding federal officers accountable than prosecution. A mechanism that faces substantial legal barriers including protections for officers, the rule that you generally can’t sue the federal government, and recent Supreme Court decisions narrowing constitutional claims.

State legislatures recognize this. California’s “No Kings Act” and New York’s parallel legislation represent attempts to create state-level accountability when federal mechanisms have failed. Whether these laws survive constitutional challenges remains uncertain. But their passage reflects growing recognition that if the federal government won’t hold its own officers accountable, someone else must.

Based on available evidence, litigation can fill that gap sometimes. Rarely. With difficulty. But sometimes. Which may be the best answer families can hope for when federal prosecutors step aside.

Our articles make government information more accessible. Please consult a qualified professional for financial, legal, or health advice specific to your circumstances.