Minnesota officials sued the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Tuesday, seeking evidence the agencies have withheld related to three shootings — two of them fatal — by federal officers during this year’s immigration crackdown.
In January, federal officers killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti, 37-year-old Minneapolis residents and U.S. citizens protesting the federal immigration operation. They also shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant who was struck in the leg and wounded during a foot chase near his home.
Federal authorities have sought to portray Good, Pretti and Sosa-Celis as aggressors who attacked immigration officers, forcing them to open fire in defense. But videos since released of all three incidents have cast doubt on those official accounts.
In Sosa-Celis’s case, federal authorities are now investigating one of the officers involved, alleging he lied under oath about the circumstances that led him to shoot the Venezuelan man. That deception prompted prosecutors’ decision last month to withdraw charges they’d filed against Sosa-Celis.
Justice Department officials, meanwhile, have been reluctant to open investigations into the deaths of Pretti and Good. The FBI’s Minnesota field office initially opened a civil rights probe of Good’s shooting before reversing course under orders from Washington to redirect efforts to investigating Good and her partner, Becca Good, instead, The Washington Post has reported.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche defended that decision saying the department investigates officer-involved shootings only “when it’s appropriate to investigate.”
“And that’s not the case here,” he told Fox News in January. Early on, department officials adopted a similar stance amid calls for a federal investigation into Pretti’s shooting, though they later reversed course and have since opened a civil rights probe.
Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed in D.C. federal court by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Drew Evans, superintendent of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, alleges federal officials refused to cooperate with their offices to investigate all three shootings.
The lawsuit also names Attorney General Pam Bondi and former homeland security secretary Kristi L. Noem, who have defended officers involved in the Minneapolis shootings, despite video evidence that called the officers’ actions into question.
The two agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“Because the shootings involved federal agents, state investigators expected federal cooperation, consistent with longstanding historical practices,” the lawsuit said. At the first two shooting scenes, “federal agents initially indicated that they would work with Minnesota authorities and share relevant information,” but state investigators found “federal agents quickly reneged on their pledges to cooperate,” the lawsuit stated. “Instead of sharing information, federal authorities … denied Minnesota investigators access to key information,” including the identities of the officers involved.
The lawsuit alleges that federal investigators’ refusal to share information was a political decision from Washington that “did not arise from any case-specific investigative need” but rather “followed intervention by senior federal officials who directed that evidence would not be shared with Minnesota authorities.” That’s why the lawsuit was filed in Washington, Ellison said at a Tuesday briefing: “That’s where decisions not to share evidence are being made.”
“This is extremely unusual. This is something that is arbitrary, capricious, it is coming from Washington, and it has scary implications for other parts of the country,” Ellison said.
He noted that federal agents blocked state investigators from the scene of the Pretti shooting even after they obtained a warrant — a move that prompted an earlier suit from Ellison and other Minnesota authorities.
A federal judge in Minneapolis issued a temporary restraining order barring DHS investigators from destroying or evidence from the scene of Pretti’s shooting.
The judge later lifted that order but called statements from Trump administration officials about their investigation into Pretti’s shooting troubling.
Their remarks, the judge said suggest “not a genuine interest in learning the truth, but snap judgments informed by speculation and motivated by political partisanship.”
In Good’s case, DHS officials removed almost all of the evidence from the scene of the shooting before state investigators arrived, including Good’s car and the gun of the officer involved, Ellison said Tuesday.
Good’s car was then shrink-wrapped and stored, Moriarty said: “They haven’t even processed it, and we don’t know if they will.”
“Minnesotans are seeing their federal government hide evidence and obstruct investigations into these incidents. We will not stand by and watch that happen,” she said. “It is unprecedented that officers shoot and kill someone in a community and there is not a thorough and transparent investigation.”
Moriarty said that after her office created a public portal for information related to the Good and Pretti shootings, they received more than a thousand submissions.
“We will continue to move forward with the investigations,” she said, based on that evidence and information from the medical examiner, adding, “I believe that we will have enough evidence at some point here to make a decision” about whether to file criminal charges.
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