The Crisis In Minnesota Signals A Rupture For Law Enforcement

The Trump administration and the Republican Party are currently scrambling to deal with the fallout after the unjustifiable killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino have been sidelined after spending the weekend lying about Pretti and blaming him for his own death. The border czar Tom Homan, who was under investigation for public corruption before returning to office, will now oversee Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minnesota. Republicans in Congress are fretting about the public backlash.

Whether there will be any actual policy changes remains to be seen, and certainly no one is holding their breath for an apology — to Pretti’s family, to Renee Good’s family or to anyone else. But even if Trump were to pull ICE entirely out of Minneapolis tomorrow, long-lasting damage has been done, particularly to the U.S. criminal justice system.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota appears to be deteriorating, and more resignations from career prosecutors may be on the horizon. Justice Department and FBI leaders in Washington have undermined their public credibility yet again in defense of the White House’s political priorities. Meanwhile, the federal deployment of ICE agents has created a major rupture between state and federal law enforcement officials in Minnesota, who once prided themselves on their cooperative working relationship with one another. The whole episode risks further destabilizing federal-state law enforcement relations throughout the country, ultimately making Americans everywhere less safe.

Already, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota has been seriously hobbled, but the full extent of the problems have only been partially visible to the public.

The office is supposed to have 50 criminal prosecutors on staff, but at the moment, there are only “about 17 prosecutors” left, according to David Lillehaug, who served as the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota during the Clinton administration and remains familiar with dynamics inside the office he once led. (A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on personnel.)

Lillehaug, who later served as a judge on the Minnesota Supreme Court, was recently enlisted by the state’s bar association to brief roughly 150 lawyers on the legal response to the federal deployment and to moderate a brainstorming session on potential legal claims or defenses against the federal government’s overreach.

“Basically, what has been happening in slow motion with the Justice Department over a year” — an unprecedented number of resignations and firings — “hit the U.S. Attorney’s Office within a matter of days,” Lillehaug told me.

At least nine prosecutors have recently left the office, including “some of the crown jewels of the force,” he said. Some of the line prosecutors still there are now thinking about leaving in the wake of Pretti’s killing, but they are worried about things getting even worse in their absence. (A DOJ spokesperson again declined to comment on personnel.)

The Justice Department has quietly tried to paper over these problems. Lillehaug told me senior officials from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Michigan have been brought in to effectively run the Minnesota office and that JAG lawyers who typically work in the military have been added to fill the gap, but this is not a long-term solution. A DOJ official said that the attorneys from the Eastern District of Michigan are assisting the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota and argued that this was a common occurrence when an office has an influx of cases or when specialized experience is needed. A person familiar with the situation added that JAGs are coming in to assist with charges against people assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers.

The administration’s immigration enforcement push has also pulled prosecutors off critical investigations and cases. “What is happening in that office — [what] is happening all around the country — is that AUSAs who were in white-collar or doing narcotics or firearms are being transferred to immigration enforcement,” Lillehaug said. (A DOJ official said that federal prosecutors are capable of prioritizing multiple needs in order to keep people in their districts safe.)

The Justice Department is also antagonizing federal judges in the district — the judges that prosecutors have to appear before every day in order to do their jobs, and whose assessment of the DOJ’s credibility can make or break their prosecutions.

Patrick Schiltz, the chief U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota, already had to publicly dispute the Justice Department’s characterization of a highly unusual effort to charge protesters after a magistrate judge declined to sign off on an arrest warrant. On Tuesday, Schiltz ordered Todd Lyons, the acting head of ICE, to appear in his courtroom on Friday after finding that the agency had defied “dozens of court orders” in recent weeks. “The court’s patience is at an end,” Schiltz wrote. Within hours, ICE reportedly released the detainee at issue in the case.

Meanwhile, DOJ and FBI leaders have only made things worse with their own public remarks in recent weeks.

In the wake of Good’s death, several prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned after the department decided to investigate Good’s widow instead of the federal officer who actually shot and killed her. Instead of adjusting course or tamping things down, Attorney General Pam Bondi went on a tirade on Fox News, claiming that the prosecutors had quit because they refused to defend federal law enforcement and announcing that she had summarily fired them instead of allowing them to take the remaining annual leave that they had accrued while working for the government.

More recently, in addition to opening a criminal investigation into elected Democrats in Minnesota, Bondi sent a letter to Gov. Tim Walz outlining a series of demands on local leaders that include giving the Trump administration access to the state’s voter rolls. The missive read more like a shakedown than an effort to ease the crisis.

For his part, FBI Director Kash Patel claimed in an interview that it was illegal for Pretti to bring a firearm to a public protest, but under Minnesota law, that is false. It sounded like another effort to blame Pretti for being needlessly killed by federal agents, but on top of that, the administration and its Republican allies are supposed to be staunch supporters of the First and Second amendments. The effort to demonize Pretti for lawfully carrying a firearm has not sit well with gun rights activists.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has taken the lead in public remarks for the Justice Department in the wake of Pretti’s killing, but he has not done any better than Bondi or Patel.

In multiple interviews in recent days, Blanche has also tried to blame state and local leaders for Pretti’s death, which, besides being unseemly and illogical — the number of federal agents in the state vastly outnumbers local law enforcement — prompted forceful pushback on the facts from Walz in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

Blanche’s fumbling is not surprising if you have been following his public appearances in recent months. Last fall, Blanche called a federal judge “disgusting” after she blocked the Trump administration’s effort to summarily deport hundreds of children to Guatemala. Blanche indignantly claimed that the administration was simply trying to reunite the children with family members, but that claim turned out to be so false that the Justice Department later had to abandon it.

Despite the early hopes of some old colleagues, Blanche is at this point publicly indistinguishable from Bondi herself.

There is a conspicuous and troubling vacuum of accountability as well. After the Good shooting, officials in the White House and Justice Department refused to admit error and missed an important opportunity to deter additional killings, intentional or otherwise, by federal immigration officials. Many people pointed out — correctly — that this decision would have the effect of encouraging more reckless behavior by federal law enforcement, and Pretti is now dead.

Given the way that the Trump administration has conducted itself, there is no good reason to believe that there will be a credible federal criminal investigation into the conduct of the officers who killed Good or Pretti, much less a federal prosecution. State prosecutors can do their best, but with the federal government working at apparent cross purposes to prevent them from investigating the officers, the hurdles will be considerable. They include legal complications like “Supremacy Clause immunity,” which makes it difficult (though not impossible) for state governments to prosecute federal officials, as well as political complications, like the possibility that the Trump administration will abuse its authority to disburse federal funds to punish the state if it pursues serious charges.

Other effects — less tangible, but still significant — are likely to persist well beyond the current moment.

Lillehaug told me that he was “shocked and dismayed” by what has already transpired in the state, and that he is concerned that it will permanently damage what had been a very cooperative relationship between federal, state and local governments and law enforcement.

“Law enforcement in Minnesota is highly collaborative — more so than most states, having something to do, I’m sure, with the state’s culture,” he added. Senior FBI leaders in the state “will go to the retirement party of the Ramsey County Sheriff. The U.S. attorney will convene a group of heads of [state] agencies for coffee.”

It is not unheard of for federal agents to address issues in Minnesota, Lillehaug said. A DEA task force might come through to tackle open air drug markets, or an ATF temporary assignment might deal with gun tracing, but that would be no more than a dozen agents, not the 3,000 agents from mostly out of town on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The prognosis is not good. “It’s going to be harder for federal and state law enforcement efforts to be cooperative,” Lillehaug told me. “There will be a great deal of suspicion, especially with those who have not separated themselves from DHS and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

The friction could extend well beyond Minnesota, particularly in the jurisdictions run by Democratic leaders that have been the favored target of the Trump administration’s most aggressive law enforcement efforts. Trust and respect are vital to these federal-state relationships, but the Trump administration has generally chosen antagonism and public disdain whenever things do not go their way.

Cooperation between federal and local law enforcement is an essential component of public safety throughout the country. The two groups often complement one another’s efforts — with federal prosecutors picking up more complex and resource-intensive cases while local prosecutors handle the much larger volume of crimes, including violent crimes and property crimes like robbery and burglary, that generally do not require the federal government’s attention or limited resources. Senior leaders are often in regular contact with one another, comparing priorities and dividing work.

As a result, a serious breakdown in the collaboration between federal and local law enforcement in any jurisdiction is a breakdown in law enforcement more generally. Whether the Trump administration understands this is unclear, but it is one of the key lessons of the tragedies and the ongoing chaos in Minnesota.

You can add it to the list of major political aberrations and ironies in the second Trump administration. With Trump at the helm, the Republican Party — once the nominal party of law and order, limited government and states’ rights — is running roughshod over the states, creating chaos in the streets and making the country less safe in the process.