In a video reminiscent of scenes in Chicago, down to the snow on the ground, an immigration agent fired shots point-blank into a car blocking a residential road in Minneapolis, killing a 37-year-old mom.
Less than 24 hours later, at a news conference in New York, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked about local officials claiming they’d been cut out of the investigation of the fatal encounter.
Minnesota braces for what’s next amid immigration arrests and in the wake of Renee Good shooting
“They have not been cut out. They do not have any jurisdiction in this investigation,” Noem told reporters. She also reiterated the Trump administration’s snap judgment that the killing was justified, despite video that seemingly showed the woman behind the wheel trying to move her vehicle out of the way.
The killing of Renee Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, again brought tensions to a flashpoint. And many in the Chicago area, where residents are still reeling from more than two months of chaos during Operation Midway Blitz, have revived a legal question.
Can or should state and local agencies investigate and potentially file charges against immigration agents who appear to have crossed the line during their enforcement actions?
The idea of doing so has the backing of some legal experts who say local law enforcement is well within its rights to file charges where they believe Illinois law has been violated, from assault to civil rights abuses to first-degree murder.
The question was also front and center at a raucous meeting Thursday night, where activists said they were tired of seeing federal officials tear through Chicago and other cities largely unchecked, harming innocent people with no criminal records in the name of immigration enforcement.
“We want these ICE agents to be arrested for their traffic violations,” Jordan Esparza-Kelley said at a news conference just before the meeting. “We need (Border Patrol chief) Gregory Bovino arrested for his use of chemical weapons.”
As elected officials past and present mount their own initiatives, from Gov. JB Pritzker’s Illinois Accountability Commission to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s ICE Accountability Project, legal experts say it is possible for state police agencies and prosecutors to investigate and bring criminal charges against federal agents while acting on duty, but the process comes with numerous challenges and has rarely been used in modern times.
Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling has thrown cold water on the idea in the past, saying people who were urging local cops to take a more active role against federal enforcement actions might not have “a clear understanding of those laws and what our limitations are as a police department.”
Snelling acknowledged that Operation Midway Blitz has brought out strong feelings in many Chicagoans and said his officers’ main role was to make sure tense encounters don’t spiral out of control.
“The facts around those feelings may be confusing, but we acknowledge that people are emotional around this and we also want them to be safe,” Snelling told the Tribune after a Chicago Police Department budget hearing last year. “So this is why we show up when there’s (been) that conflict between agents and members of the community, because we don’t want these situations to escalate as far to a higher level of violence.”
Calls for investigations
The idea of state and local law enforcement holding federal agents responsible for their actions has been pushed by Chicago civil rights attorneys for months as a flurry of lawsuits have challenged everything from conditions at holding facilities to the use of force against protesters and media.
Speaking to reporters Thursday after a court hearing one of those lawsuits, attorney Craig Futterman said state officials need to do more should there be another surge in enforcement here.
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“If and when Bovino and his agents come back to Chicago, if and when his agents commit crimes against people of Illinois — they try to kill a mom, assault or batter a journalist, assault or batter a priest — then we expect our local officials also to stand up and to stop them, to arrest them and to prosecute them for violating the laws of Illinois,” Futterman, of the Mandel Legal Law Clinic, said in the lobby of the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
The outcry for investigations at the local level has circulated for months.
Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has repeatedly been asked whether her office would pursue charges against federal agents.
“I am a state court prosecutor, which means my jurisdiction is for state crimes,” she said during a City Club address in December. “All of the Border Patrol and ICE agents are federal agents. They are regulated by the federal government.”
In a statement to the Tribune on Friday, her office said it is “committed to pursuing justice in all cases, including prosecuting police or ICE officers when they break the law or abuse their power. In such a case, the CCSAO will bring criminal charges if it receives evidence from a law enforcement agency that is supported under Illinois law.”
In October, a left-leaning voters’ rights group wrote to Burke, Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul asking their offices to launch investigations into the conduct of immigration agents.
In response to the letter, Pritzker said, at an unrelated news conference, that arresting federal agents is “nothing we’ve suggested would happen.”
“What we have suggested, though, is that we keep records and that eventually the Congress will hold people accountable. That’s probably the first thing that could happen because there’s an election in 2026,” the governor said.
During a White House press briefing one day after the shooting in Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance scoffed at the idea of local investigations, saying agents have “absolute immunity.”
“The idea that Tim Walz and a bunch of radicals in Minneapolis are going to go after and make this guy’s life miserable because he was doing the job that he was asked to do is preposterous,” Vance said. “The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official could actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity. I’ve never seen anything like that. It would get tossed out by a judge.”
But legal experts said Vance is wrong on two counts: Federal agents have some immunity, but it is not absolute. And it’s not unprecedented for states to investigate and charge federal agents.
“One of the narratives that has come out of this administration in recent months is ‘we are immune,’ and that’s incorrect,” said Noah Smith-Drelich, an assistant professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Attorney Steve Art, of the firm Loevy & Loevy, said the accountability doesn’t end with agents on the street, but goes up the chain. The firm was involved in a lawsuit challenging use-of-force tactics.
“This is an administration that puts a lot of its chips on immunity,” Art said. “Obviously, the Supreme Court has told President (Donald) Trump that he is immune for his official actions. That immunity does not extend to other folks in the administration.”
How far does immunity go?
The U.S. Supreme Court established decades ago that, in general, a federal officer cannot be held on a state criminal charge where the alleged crime arose during the performance of his federal duties.
However, charges can be brought if it can be proved that the officer’s actions were so egregious they could not have reasonably believed it was in accordance with their official duties. Even then, defendants are often able to get their case removed to federal court to settle the question of immunity.
“Federal officers do not have absolute immunity for actions taken on the job but they do have some immunities,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The idea behind the concept of immunity for federal officers is to prevent a situation where states could grind the federal government to a halt by commonly arresting its agents, Godar said, but the protection is not absolute if the facts of the case support that the officer was acting unreasonably.
Historically, states have pursued charges against federal authorities during times of great conflict between states and federal government, such as during the Prohibition Era and when northern states opposed the Fugitive Slave Act.
“We see this at certain times but we haven’t necessarily been in that period in recent decades,” Godar said.
In more recent history, FBI sharpshooter Lon Horiuchi in 1997 was charged with manslaughter in Idaho state court for killing an unarmed woman during the infamous standoff at Ruby Ridge. Horiuchi successfully removed the case to federal court, where a judge dismissed the charges based on the immunity issue.
While an appeals panel later reversed the decision and sent the case back to state court, the newly elected local prosecutor wound up dropping all charges against Horiuchi.
The same battle played out more recently in the case of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent charged with running a stop sign and killing a bicyclist in Salem, Oregon, while conducting a narcotics surveillance operation in 2023.
Like Horiuchi had three decades earlier, the DEA agent, Samuel Landis, had his case removed to federal court on the question of immunity.
Last month, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling dismissing the charge of criminally negligent homicide, ruling that Landis’ actions were in his federal capacity and thought to be reasonable at the moment, entitling him to immunity from state prosecution.
“A federal agent seeking federal immunity is not required ‘to show that his action was in fact necessary or in retrospect justifiable, only that he reasonably thought it to be,’” the 9th Circuit opinion stated.
Challenges
While prosecuting a federal agent for an action committed in the course of their official duties is possible on paper, in practice it is fraught with legal pitfalls and real-world impracticalities — which is why so few cases in modern times are brought.
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The problems start almost immediately. First, state and local authorities likely do not have investigatory jurisdiction at a scene where federal agents have been conducting operations, shutting them out of control over any alleged crime scene and quick access to witnesses and evidence.
That includes the accused officer, who as a federal employee would make any statements to his superiors as part of an administrative review that would not be admissible in state court. Those internal reviews also play out behind closed doors, and in some cases it’s hard to tell which agency was even taking the lead.
In Minnesota, state investigators quickly ran into this problem. Though officials attempted to participate in investigating Good’s shooting, within a day, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced it was pulling out of the investigation after the federal government blocked its access to evidence and other information it would need to review the shooting.
Those issues were also on display in both Chicago-area shooting cases arising out of Operation Midway Blitz: the Sept. 12 killing of Silverio Villegas-González by an ICE agent during a traffic stop in Franklin Park, and the shooting of motorist Marimar Martinez by a Border Patrol agent in Brighton Park three weeks later.
Body camera footage made public after Villegas-González’s killing captured a conversation between Franklin Park police Director Michael Witz and Officer Thomas Ferris about who would investigate the shooting. They quickly came to the conclusion it was the feds’ prerogative.
“It’s their guys who shot,” Witz says. “You know what I’m saying?”
“Public integrity?” Ferris asks.
“It’s their guys. It’s not our guys.”
Although officials with the FBI were seen at the site of the shooting, sources later told the Tribune it was DHS that was handling the follow-up investigation, including whether the officer was justified in opening fire.
DHS has since refused to provide an update.
It was a similar scene after Martinez’s shooting on Oct. 4, when a Border Patrol agent opened fire after colliding with Martinez’s vehicle during an immigrant-enforcement operation, wounding her five times.
At that scene, an angry crowd quickly assembled and a tense confrontation ensued. But while Chicago police helped with crowd control, it was the FBI and other federal agencies that held jurisdiction over the shooting scene.
As Martinez was being charged with assaulting a federal officer, the FBI processed her vehicle for evidence, and then allowed the officer, Charles Exum, to drive his SUV back to his home base in Maine before it could be inspected by Martinez’s attorneys.
The charges against Martinez were dropped by the U.S. attorney’s office after it was revealed in court that Exum had sent texts bragging about his marksmanship in shooting Martinez and saying he was ready for “another round of f— around and find out.”
The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has refused to say whether Exum is still on the force or if he’s faced any discipline at all for Martinez’s shooting.
After the charges were dropped, it was revealed in court that the U.S. attorney’s office in South Bend, Indiana, is conducting some type of continuing criminal investigation into the incident, and that Martinez’s car is still considered evidence in that probe. But further details on who or what they are looking at were not released.
In Broadview, where the local police department has opened criminal investigations into conduct of federal agents who have clashed with protesters outside the immigration facility in the western suburb, investigators encountered resistance in their attempts to get information from the federal government.
In a Sept. 29 email to Russell Hott, who was ICE’s field office director at the time, Broadview police Chief Thomas Mills asked for federal cooperation with three investigations: two alleged hit-and-runs and one alleged case of criminal damage after a TV reporter’s car was hit with a pepper ball.
“There are allegations that these incidents involved agents from your agency. In order to proceed effectively, we are requesting your assistance in obtaining the necessary information in order to conduct a complete and transparent investigation into these matters,” Mills wrote in the email, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request.
But the appeal appeared to be for naught.
Hott’s reply didn’t directly address Mills’ query, instead making a list of allegations against protesters who were at that point regularly demonstrating outside the building and weathering substantial chemical munitions from agents guarding the facility.
“We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with your department and would appreciate any assistance on any investigation related to the slashed tires, keyed vehicles and sugar in the fuel tanks of over 15 vehicles damaged by violent rioters,” Hott wrote.
The village of Broadview has since closed two out of three of its investigations due to lack of cooperation from the alleged victim, a spokesperson said, while the criminal damage case remains open. The spokesperson said local police were waiting for ICE and DHS to provide video footage and other documents, and that the federal agencies were conducting their own probe into the matter.
Even if state authorities are able to properly investigate a case and consider charges against a federal officer, the legal road is bumpy.
“Any use-of-force case against a law enforcement officer requires digging into this question of reasonableness, and what is reasonable is often a really contested, difficult question,” Godar said.
Still, with tensions simmering between state and federal government, Godar, in a research paper on the topic, wrote that the U.S. might be headed into a new era bringing forth the specter of past state and federal clashes over slavery and Prohibition.
“With the United States seemingly entering such a period, it may only be a matter of time before similar cases arise again,” she wrote.
Tribune reporter Jake Sheridan contributed.