That is, investigate it, before making any decision on charges.
That is, investigate it, before making any decision on charges.
I n connection with the tragic death of Renee Good, shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross after she appears to have assaulted him by driving her car in his direction, the Trump Justice Department is conflating two saliently different things: (1) whether he should be charged with a crime, and (2) whether there should be an investigation.
Now, it sounds like I have that backward, right? In law enforcement, the investigation is done first; if it turns up enough inculpatory evidence, charges are then filed. But my framing reflects the ill-conceived Trump DOJ approach.
The administration is basically saying: We’ve already decided, based on the videos that everyone in America has seen, that Agent Ross would have a defense — justified use of lethal force owing to reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury. Therefore, there is no point in conducting an investigation. That is essentially what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told my friend Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday.
Of course, that is not how things are supposed to work when a person dies as the result of an encounter with a federal agent or a police officer. And yes, I’ve intentionally refrained from saying, “when a person is killed by a federal agent”; though accurate, the word kill connotes murder, or at least actionable homicide, and that’s not what I believe happened (as I have explained here and here).
When death results from a law enforcement encounter, it is standard and prudent for the FBI to conduct a thorough investigation, preferably with the assistance of the local authorities. Such an investigation should determine not only whether it is appropriate to present any homicide or civil rights charges against the officer to a grand jury, but also whether proper procedures were followed and whether changes need to be made in an effort to avoid repetition. No one wants people to die due to interactions with law enforcement, so we need to know exactly what happened, even if there is no basis to charge a criminal offense.
Note: Ordinarily, if there is a confrontation between private parties, and then a police investigation finds no basis to file criminal charges, that should be the end of the matter as far as government investigators are concerned. If the private parties want to pursue lawsuits in the civil justice system, that is the appropriate avenue for further investigation, assignment of culpability, and remediation. By contrast, when a person loses his or her life due to government action, then the government owes the public a credible investigation of its conduct, even if the conduct should not be the subject of criminal charges.
As Rich Lowry and I have discussed extensively on our podcast over the last couple of episodes, there is a meaningful difference between saying an agent has a defense to a criminal charge and saying that the agent performed in an exemplary fashion.
To repeat, the legal test for whether a use of force was justified focuses strictly on whether an officer, at the moment of firing a weapon, had a reasonable fear of death. The Supreme Court has said (most recently, in Barnes v. Felix (2025)) that the totality of the circumstances must be weighed. Yet, the circumstances at the moment of shooting are usually dispositive because our focus is on the use of force, not whether the officer (or, for that matter, the victim) made tragic choices in the lead up to that fateful moment. Obviously, we could not have effective law enforcement if, in the fast-moving, often unanticipated events of an unfolding confrontation, an officer were deemed to forfeit his right of self-defense because of some mistake in the lead-up to a shooting. If, as a matter of law, an officer should not have pulled a car over, or if, as a matter of proper tactics, he should have approached the car from a different angle, such errors do not mean the officer loses his right to use force if the driver then threatens him with death or serious injury.
Still, those errors are not irrelevant. They — their role in the lethal outcome — must be investigated. There must be an accounting. The government owes that to the public and the victim’s loved ones — even if the victim committed a crime or was otherwise in the wrong.
This isn’t treacle; it’s common sense in a rule of law society.
It is difficult to understand what the Trump administration is doing here. The Washington Post reports that the FBI initiated a civil rights probe of the shooting — which would be standard, appropriate procedure — but that the Justice Department has concluded that no investigation was warranted, as Blanche told Bream on Fox. The FBI has countered that the Post’s report is inaccurate; in an X post by an outlet the bureau calls “FBI Rapid Response,” it stated:
This [press report] is false — the decisions referenced here were not made by the FBI.
The FBI still continues to pursue evidence in this case with our federal partners, investigating the shooting incident as well as the ongoing violent criminal actors and their funding sources.
The facts are the initiator, and the facts do not support civil rights investigation.
I’ll try to translate (prior to Trump 2.0, I was fluent in federal law-enforcement-speak . . . now, I’m not so sure). The bureau seems to be saying that the decisions about investigating with an eye toward bringing a particular charge — here, a civil rights charge — are the Justice Department’s call, not the FBI’s. That is true. But the Justice Department generally does not tell the FBI whether it may investigate an incident at all (as opposed to what charges might be filed) — that’s the essentially bureau’s call (with the understanding that the FBI answers to the attorney general and deputy attorney general).
In this instance, the FBI is still examining the shooting. It says it is doing so “with our federal law enforcement partners.” That strongly suggests that the feds have cut out the Minneapolis Police Department and any other state law enforcement components from Minnesota (no doubt based on the Trump administration’s view that, even when there is a state interest in an incident involving federal agents — as there obviously is when someone is shot and dies — the feds should not share investigative information with agents of states and municipalities that follow sanctuary policies (i.e., that do not cooperate with the federal government in enforcing immigration law)).
The FBI’s X post elaborates that, in addition to the shooting, the feds are investigating the “violent criminal actors,” which I take to be the anti-ICE protesters, some of whom — but not all — are lawbreakers using force to interfere with immigration-law enforcement operations.
Several things flow from this.
First, it is good that the FBI is investigating the shooting, but it seems the only federal charge that could arise out of this incident would be a civil rights offense (presumably under Section 242 of the penal code, which criminalizes “deprivation of rights under color of law”). A Justice Department investigation that, before completion, takes civil rights off the table is not going to be credible — even if, as I believe based on what I’ve seen, prosecutors should decline to charge a civil rights crime.
Second, it is certainly proper for the FBI to investigate people who obstruct ICE operations. Elected Democrats in Minnesota may loathe Congress’s immigration statutes, which enable the apprehension and deportation of illegal aliens, but they are the law of the land. The Supreme Court has consistently held that the federal government has primacy in this regard: Federal agents may enforce these laws regardless of whether progressive communities want them enforced. (Those communities, we should note, pass the prohibitive costs of their wayward sanctuary policies onto the rest of the country — i.e., onto the majority of the public that favors legal, but not illegal, immigration.)
Nevertheless, if what the FBI is saying turns out to be a smokescreen for a too-typical exercise in Trump-era retributive lawfare, in which the deceased woman and her partner are singled out in order to divert attention from any potential law enforcement missteps, then that will be as asinine as it is grotesque. If the immigration laws are going to be effectively enforced, the federal authorities need to be perceived as earnest and fair, not mendacious and monstrous.
Third, the fact that the Trump administration’s law enforcement agencies do not want to work with the police of sanctuary jurisdictions, such as Minneapolis, is self-defeating. The state interest in public welfare does not disappear just because the feds do not acknowledge it; Minneapolis and Minnesota authorities will still do an investigation, it just won’t be as thorough as it would be with federal cooperation (just as the FBI’s probe will be flawed without state and municipal input). Moreover, the federal, state, and municipal authorities have to work together if the federal law enforcement objectives are to be achieved. Minnesota may not want to help the feds enforce immigration laws (though it should); but state and municipal officials presumably do not want street violence and do not want Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act or other measures empowering him to send in military forces — that could make matters even worse.
If there are any adults left in the room, it should be possible for FBI and DOJ officials to cooperate with their state and municipal counterparts on an agreement regarding (a) what the state is willing to do to ensure that protesters exercising their First Amendment rights do not cross the line into criminal obstruction of legitimate federal enforcement actions; and (b) what ICE and other federal agencies are willing to do to reduce tensions while going about their legitimate mission.
In saying this, I concede that it may be a remorseless fact of today’s Democratic Party politics that the radicals call the tune, such that elected Democrats will not engage in responsible policing to avoid potentially lethal confrontations. The hard left is invigorated by Renee Good’s shooting death and is not chagrined by the chaos, which — with the media’s help, it blames on ICE. Nevertheless, it would be a dereliction of duty for the feds not to try to reestablish a cooperative relationship with their state counterparts. It is not the Trump administration’s style to tone down the rhetoric, but it is what the moment calls for.
The way the Trump administration is going about this makes it far more likely that Agent Jonathan Ross will eventually be charged with homicide. If the investigation of the shooting is not thorough and credible, both the Minnesota authorities and a future Democratic administration (which could be in power as early as 2029) will conclude that there should be a prosecution. President Trump can pretermit a Democratic successor by pardoning Ross. That, however, would bar only federal indictment; it would have no effect on potential state homicide charges. There is no statute of limitations on murder. The state could proceed with charges now, or it could wait Trump out, calculating that a new Democratic administration would cooperate in, rather than contest, a state prosecution.
Take down the temperature. Do a thorough DOJ and FBI investigation that invites state cooperation, hopefully as part of a negotiated truce between the Trump administration and Minnesota on immigration enforcement. Issue a report that compellingly explains why there should be no homicide or civil rights charges (assuming that is the conclusion). Such a report, if it is credible, would be the most effective way to remedy any flaws in ICE procedures, promote effective immigration enforcement, and forfend a future prosecution of Agent Ross.