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A
Carla.
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I'm Carla Lally, cookbook author and snack enthusiast. Do you have a sweet tooth? Check out Sweets Unwrapped, a podcast from Ferrero and Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio. Together we're celebrating the traditions that make life sweet. Tune in now.
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This week, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop in Houston, the first time immigration agents have shot and killed someone since the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Preddy in Minnesota. We don't have videos of the Houston incident yet and we don't fully know what happened, but the agency has already released a conclusive statement about the incident. The words were familiar. The man they wrote weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self defense, which is very similar to the story ICE told about Renee Goode and very different from what the videos showed happened to her that day. I'm Hanna Rosen, this is Radio Atlantic. Six months after the two shootings in Minnesota, the federal government hasn't properly investigated either one. They actually appear to be making it harder, not easier for state officials Looking into the shootings in the face of these non investigations is Todd Blanche, currently the Acting Attorney General, who next week will testify at a Senate hearing to be confirmed in the permanent role. But something else has also happened in those six months. Minnesota has pushed back and is looking into filing char against the federal agents. And states around the country will be watching to see if they too can hold federal agents accountable when the federal government won't. To explain what the federal government isn't doing, what that says about the current Justice Department and how states are pushing back. I'm joined by Atlantic staff writer Quinta Jurecik, who writes about law and democracy. Quinta, welcome back to the show.
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B
Thank you for having me.
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C
So Renee Good and Alex Preddy were shot and killed in Minneapolis in January. It's now July. How would the DOJ normally have responded?
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B
By now, what we would normally expect is that the Justice Department Civil Rights Division would be conducting a criminal civil rights investigation into what happened to Renee Goode and Alex Preddy, whether their rights were violated in these sh. Instead, what has happened is that DOJ immediately closed down the possibility of a civil rights investigation into Renee Goode's death. And while DOJ has said that it is conducting an investigation into Alex Preddy's death, we haven't seen any information that suggests that that is moving forward in any serious way. Now, perhaps things could be happening behind the scenes. But it is worth noting, some reporting from CBS in the spring that indicated lawyers assigned to that case are not the people who you would normally expect. The criminal section of the Civil Rights Division has or used to have some real experts in investigating these cases of potential law enforcement abuses. It's a specialty. Instead, what we saw is that the people assigned to this investigation were newcomers to the Civil Rights Division. One of the people assigned, Robert Keenan, previously made headlines early in the Trump administration after he'd moved to the Civil Rights Division, argued that a judge should sentence a police officer being prosecuted in the Breonna Taylor case to a single day in jail. So I think that is indicative of the fact that the Civil Rights Division does not seem to be treating this investigation with the seriousness and alacrity that it perhaps deserves.
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C
And would you characterize how they're going about it? I can't tell from what you're describing if they're just slowing things down tremendously or really getting in the way of a real investigation.
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I think it's both. What we see is that two things have happened. One is that the federal government, to the extent that it is conducting investigations, seems to be moving very slowly and not with particular interest or focus. So we have this DOJ investigation. There is also a DHS internal investigation into the conduct of the ICE agent who shot Renee Goode and the CBP officers who shot Alex Prednison. DHS told me that those investigations are ongoing, but we don't have any information about what that might look like. The other thing that's happening is that the federal government is affirmatively blocking state and local investigators from conducting their own separate probes. What happened in the Renee Goode case was that initially things happened like they normally would. You had federal and state and local investigators working alongside one another to collect evidence. Then what happened is that the Justice Department suddenly said, actually, we don't want to collaborate with you. You don't have access to any of this material. In the Preddy case, what happened is that federal officials just blocked state and local officials from accessing the evidence and the scene to begin with. And so now the Minnesota and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, which is the county where Minneapolis sits, is suing the federal government and federal court in D.C. to access this evidence that has been withheld from them and that the federal still refusing to turn over.
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C
So there's some tension there. I do want to know more about what the states are doing, but first I want to understand how unusual this Federal government behavior is because we are used to, at least in cases of alleged police misconduct, the DOJ being the active entity holding local police departments accountable. Like if you think of Michael Brown and Ferguson or Laquan McDonald in Chicago, and, of course, George Floyd in Minneapolis. So that's the pattern we are used to seeing. So how unusual is it what the federal government is doing in the cases of Pretty and good.
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B
I think what we're seeing is almost an inversion of the pattern that we might expect, where, as you say, typically, if there is a case of a law enforcement killing that seems to in some way be concerning, potentially might have involved, you know, a violation of somebody's rights, even if local or state law enforcement is not particularly interested in pursuing that case, the federal government is the entity that will often come in and really sort of take the lead on those investigations. And even in cases where state and local law enforcement are interested, the federal government will be a collaborator. So you mentioned the George Floyd case, which of course, also happened in Minneapolis in 2020. In that instance, federal investigators looked that case alongside state investigators and the police officer who was later found to have murdered George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, was prosecuted in both state and federal court. What we're seeing now is that this is kind of turned inside out. The federal government, which has, at least since the civil rights movement, been kind of playing this role of the protector of civil rights, is now affirmatively slow walking and blocking the ability of the state to conduct these investigations. And so I think what we find is that while we're not in completely uncharted waters, and we can talk about that a little bit, we are now in a situation that is not immediately familiar.
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C
Right. Okay. This situation is a little bit different because it's a federal agent you're trying to hold accountable, not a police officer. So that does make a difference. So what is the state trying to do? Because it is a reversal. It's like the state trying to protect one of its citizens. And the actor here is a federal agent.
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B
The state is doing a couple things. One, as I mentioned, both Minnesota and the Hennepin County Attorney's office are suing the federal government, trying to get access to the information that has been withheld. And so the evidence they're trying to access is the evidence in the Renee Goode case, including just, you know, basic things like the car.
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C
Yeah.
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Which is, as far as Minnesota knows, still in a FBI evidence facility that has been untouched. It's trying to get information in the Alex Preddy case. And again, there's been so little information shared about that that the federal government has not even confirmed the identities of the officers who shot Preddy. It's also trying to get information in a third case that involves the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Sosacelles, an ice age into Sosacelles house after a chase and wounded him in the leg. Again, the state and county were really limited in the evidence they were able to obtain, and they're suing for that information, too. So that's one category. The other category is.
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C
And when you say they're suing, they're suing who? The federal government.
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They're suing the federal government? Yes. They are suing the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
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C
Interesting.
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Okay, so that's one category. The other category is seeing what the state and the county can do on their own without the evidence that the federal government is refusing to hand over. We have actually seen one case filed in state court. This is in the Sosacelles case. The county filed criminal charges against Christian Castro, the ICE agent who shot Sosacelles. It's also actually filed charges in another case involving a road rage incident. It filed charges against an ICE agent in that. And then in the Good and Pretty cases. I spoke to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and she told me that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the state investigative agency, is currently conducting its own investigation into the Good and Preddy cases, looking at the evidence available to the state, which includes a lot of the video evidence filmed by onlookers, and that Moriarty was expecting that the state would hand her office information about what they were able to determine, and that her office will then make a decision about whether or not they believe that the evidence that they have shows that a crime was committed. If they do think that they can prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt, then they may go forward and charge those cases. But she did emphasize to me that her office has not yet reached a decision about whether crimes were committed in those instances.
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C
Okay, so you have the state moving on various fronts. How unusual is it for the state to take the lead? I have in my head here, Ruby Ridge, another case where federal agents were the defendants. So it's not the very first time that you have tension between the state and federal agents. So this dynamic that we're now seeing with ICE agents in Minneapolis, how unusual is it?
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B
I would say it's not unprecedented, but it is unusual. So you mentioned the Ruby Ridge case. This was a Idaho state court case filed by a county prosecutor against an FBI agent over deaths that occurred in the Ruby ridge standoff in 1992. That case took a decade to litigate, and it was eventually dropped when a new county prosecutor took over and decided not to move forward with the charges. Now, there are other less kind of ripped from the headlines cases, but Ruby Ridge, I think, is a useful touch point for a couple of reasons. One is that it shows how hard these cases can be to prosecute. That litigation took a really long time, and the county eventually decided that it simply wasn't worth it. I think Ruby Ridge is also useful because it is an example of why it is that states tend to bring these cases. I spoke with Brynna Godar, who's a staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She studies, among other things, these kinds of state prosecutions of federal officials. And one point she made to is that we tend to see these kinds of efforts by states to prosecute federal officials when you see friction or disagreement between states and the federal government over what to prioritize in law enforcement. And so Ruby Ridge is a case where the federal government wanted to protect and back this FBI agent. Idaho felt differently. And so you had this kind of clash. And her point was that we typically haven't seen that many of those clashes recently because generally, with some exceptions like Ruby Ridge, the states and the federal government have been more or less aligned. But what we're seeing here is that when the federal government is really driving hard on immigration enforcement in ways that have led to pretty shocking violence, we again see this divergence between state and federal priorities. And that's why we're seeing states start to experiment with bringing these cases, the
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C
principles underneath all this that then will be explored and tested in this period. One of them is immunity. In the days after Good was killed, various Trump officials said some version of ICE officers have immunity and they've walked that back. There's been the phrase qualified immunity, which I'm familiar with from police officers. So how is that concept? Because I think that's the important concept here, is how much immunity do ICE agents have? Which taps into the larger question of how do you hold federal agents and the federal government accountable? So can you just talk through how that could be explored in these cases that are about to come up.
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B
So, as you say, I think listeners might be familiar with the idea of qualified immunity. This is in some ways similar and in some ways different. So, like qualified immunity, it is a form of immunity that protects you from legal accountability, protects law enforcement officers. Qualified immunity applies in, you know, a civil lawsuit, you know, I sue a police officer because they. I feel that they violated my rights in some way, and it protects them from my attempting to hold them accountable in court, whether state or federal, whether that law enforcement is state, local, federal.
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C
And it protects them because in the course of duty, like, there's just a certain expectation of what police work is or how does it protect them.
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B
Yeah. So it's a doctrine that has been sort of engineered by federal courts with the idea that you want to give officers wiggle room, essentially, to do what they need to do. You don't want officers to be held, you know, terrified to make a move.
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C
Right.
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B
What we're talking about here is something that's called supremacy clause immunity, and that's different from qualified immunity, because it applies is only in a situation where you have a state criminal prosecution of a federal official.
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C
Okay. Which is what's happening.
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B
Exactly. Yeah. And so the idea is that under the Constitution, supremacy clause, federal law is the supreme law of the land. So you can't have a state trying to criminalize a federal official just carrying out their normal duties. And so the idea is, the legal standard is essentially says that when an officer is carrying out their duties as authorized by federal law, and when their actions are necessary and proper in fulfilling their federal duties, then they are immune from criminal prosecution in state court.
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C
Right. I can think of cases like desegregating schools in the south, when you'd have federal agents desegregating schools, you know, by supreme court edict, you wouldn't want state officials to be able to prosecute them for following the federal law. Right?
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B
That's right.
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C
Okay. Got it.
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B
What we're gonna see is how far can states get by arguing that supremacy clause immunity does not apply? And so the state in this case, so Hennepin county in the Christian Castro and in the road rage case, maybe possibly in the good and pretty cases, if they do decide to move forward with a criminal case, they're going to argue that the conduct alleged by these federal officials is not within the scope of their duties as federal officials, or that it is not necessary and proper to. To carrying out those duties, that essentially they were acting outside their federal responsibilities, or that they breach the boundaries of acceptable behavior by a federal officer. And what is going to be tested in probably federal court, potentially state court as well, is how is it that judges are going to evaluate those arguments? And I think that is particularly important right now, because federal courts have traditionally been pretty friendly to the federal government in these cases. But what Happens now when we have federal judges who are frankly fed up with the Justice Department. This case, if federal judges end up hearing it in Minnesota, this is a group of judges who have had to deal with all kinds of things coming out of the Justice Department, coming out of Operation Metro Surge, including some pretty egregious violations of rights of. Of people who are held in immigration detention by ice.
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C
And I also remember those six federal prosecutors in Minnesota who reportedly resigned because the Justice Department wanted to push to investigate Goode's widow. So there's already a sort of tension there.
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B
That's exactly right. And so I think my big question is, you know, does the increased skepticism that we have seen from federal judges toward the conduct of the Justice Department and the conduct of the federal government, might that extend to the arguments that are going to be made here, presumably by these officers, such that judges will be more open to allowing state prosecutors to move forward with these cases?
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C
Right. And if it succeeds in Minnesota, you can see a situation where it begins to restrict how ICE agents can behave all over the country as states start to bring similar lawsuits. Okay, I want to ask you about something in the news. Another similar case this week. An ICE agent shot and killed a man in Houston. That's the first time that's happened since Minnesota. How do you expect what's happening in Minnesota to affect how the Houston situation plays out?
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B
We don't know much about what happened in Houston yet. So ICE has said that the man, a Mexican immigrant named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, attempted to run over an agent during a vehicle stop. I think we've seen, among other cases in the Sosa sales case, that ICE is not always reliable in stating what happened after one of these interactions. So we will have to wait for more information to come out. I think what this shows is the patchwork nature of relying on local law enforcement to investigate these cases when you have the Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigating them. There is one agency that is responsible for looking into all of these things, and you can expect some level of a single standard that is being applied when you have state and local officials, it may vary by who is in charge, the particular politics, the particular environment in that state, what the laws are in that state. In Minnesota, we have this very aggressive county prosecutor in Hennepin county that was really motivated to move forward with these prosecutions. And so I think there are additional questions just because the political situation in Texas is different than it is in Minnesota. And that kind of shows you what the limitations are of this sort of
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more Local approach After the break, I asked Quinta about Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General who's been overseeing these non investigations and whose confirmation hearing is next week.
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A
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C
Okay. Quinta, who is Todd Blanche?
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B
Todd Blanche is the acting Attorney General for the Justice Department. He was confirmed by the Senate as the Deputy Attorney General, then elevated to acting after Pam Bondi resigned, and he is now also Trump's nominee to serve as the Senate confirmed Attorney general. He is also, not coincidentally, Trump's former defense attorney. He represented in the criminal cases against Trump over the 2020 election, over the Mar A Lago case, and also in the New York State prosecution regarding Trump's interactions with Stormy Daniels.
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C
And how involved has he been in the cases that we've been discussing as
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acting AG Blanche has really been the face of the Justice Department's decision making here. So he said after Renee Goode's death that DOJ would not be conducting an investigation. He also, after Alex Preddy's death, that it would be conducting a criminal civil rights investigation, although he also sort of tried to play it down at the same time. He said in a press conference, and I quote, I don't want the takeaway to be that there's a massive civil rights investigation that's happening. This is what I would describe as a standard investigation by the FBI.
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C
Wow. Right. So he's just trying to describe it as business as usual, even though it's in fact extremely unusual. Now, Pam Bondi, who came before him, she was also the face of a lot of these statements when the original shootings happened. So is there anything distinctive about how he's been doing things at the Justice
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Department after Bondi left? I think what we started to see is that the degree of politicization that Bondi had carried out in the Justice Department, a lot of lawyers thought, you know, this is terrible. This is the worst it's ever been. It turns out it could get worse and that Blanche really launched this, this kind of campaign, I would argue, and I think there's a fair amount of reporting that indicates this to kind of audition for Trump to nominate him as Attorney General in the permanent role. There were a lot of prosecutions brought on extremely thin grounds. So the Comey 8647 case is among them. Cases that DOJ had previously looked at and thrown out as simply meritless. And so the fact that Blanche is sort of emphasizing his willingness to do whatever Trump wants to make Trump happy by going after his enemies, I think is striking.
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C
Is there another example of that?
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B
There's also the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law center, which is a left leaning anti extremism group. The Justice Department unveiled this case against it, essentially arguing that SPLC had been defrauding its donors by paying informants within far right groups who were infiltrating those groups. SPLC would say this infiltration was part of our anti extremism work. DOJ is saying that this is actually a fraud on its donors, something that the SPLC is obviously fighting. The organization have said that the prosecution is part of a retribution campaign and accused President Trump of using the DOJ as a political weapon to go after his political enemies. I will say that people I talked to who are former prosecutors were extremely dubious about this case in a number of different directions. And as with the 8647 case, I think it's just an example of Blanche really willing to cut corners and do anything that he can to get the headline, even if the case will ultimately not hold up in court.
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C
And when you talk to people in the Justice Department, professionals, or even when you look at this as a legal expert, is the difference that he's willing to take on cases that have ever flimsier evidence? Is the difference that he's the President's personal attorney and so he just has a different degree of loyalty? Is the difference that he's less experienced in this kind of way?
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B
I think it's a combination of being willing to do absolutely anything for Trump and to make Trump happy. And that is definitely hard not to read that in conjunction with Blanche's history as Trump's defense attorney, I think it is also a new willingness to bring cases that just simply make no sense, that previously what we saw is cases that didn't really meet the legal standard, but that DOJ would maybe stretch the facts to conform to the law. We saw this, for example, in the first Comey case where DOJ really was kind of stretching things to argue that Comey had lied in front of Congress. These cases, I think what we're seeing, just the SPLC in 8647, is stretching the law itself, arguing that things are crimes that aren't even crimes. And so it's a new way of kind of trying to force a square peg into a round hole in order to make Trump happy.
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C
Okay, so Todd Blanche's confirmation hearings are next week. What do you expect from those hearings?
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B
One of the lessons, I think, that we've all learned in the second Trump administration is to simply never say never. So if Blanche does manage to secure enough votes to make it through, I unfortunately would not be surprised. That said, I also think it is the case that Blanche's willingness to basically do anything to please Trump may well have really harmed his ability to get confirmed. He has so thoroughly kind of smashed through any guardrail that was preventing DOJ from being politicized by the president. He has just sort of warped the department's priorities in so many ways that he seems like a much weaker candidate. And then that is combined with the fact that we're heading into the midterms. We have a number of senators, including two in the Judiciary Committee, Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who are Republicans, who have real beef with Trump, are not happy with him at all, and are leaving and are leaving so they don't have to consider the same kind of electoral issues that they did previously. Tillis because he's retiring, and Cornyn because he lost the Republican Senate primary after Trump endorsed against him. And so that signals to me that if these senators wanted to make a stand, Blanche is potentially one that you might expect them to make and draw a line in the sand and say, this is unacceptable.
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C
Also, Amy Klobuchar, who's a Democrat, is on the committee, and she represents Minnesota and has been very critical of DOJ's actions. So she couldn't prevent his confirmation, but she certainly could bring up a lot of things.
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B
That's right. And I think that the, you know, the Minnesota cases are a useful additional example to what we've been talking about in terms of the Justice Department under Blanche bringing cases that are totally meritless. That's one category. And then there's the cases in Minnesota where DOJ isn't investigating cases that you would really want them to investigate. So it's this sort of one, two punch of looking into things where there's nothing there and refusing to take seriously, cases that you really actually would want. Doj to pursue. Okay.
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C
I want to go beyond Todd Blanche. The Trump administration here. As we've talked about, Ruby Ridge took years and years to work itself out. As we've also talked about, there are new precedents being set about accountability in states and the federal government. As you look on the long Horiz, like, let's say these Minnesota cases stretch way beyond Trump and the questions of immunity and accountability due to what are the things that you're gonna be watching that you think are. That could provide lasting shifts? We haven't even talked about the changes in the Civil Rights Division, which could also provide lasting shifts. But where. What are you looking at as the lasting effects of either the way the Justice Department is operating or the way the states are operating?
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B
New what has been really striking to me is how much law is being made right now at the district court and appellate court level that is profoundly skeptical of the Justice Department. DOJ has really been operating in this environment where, as I've said, judges are willing to take what DOJ says at face value, cut them some slack. There's a level of kind of institutional trust that was there, and that trust is just being chipped away and chipped away and chipped away to a point where you have started to really see judges simply say, I don't trust you anymore. Right. You have to prove everything that you're about to say to me, come bring the U.S. attorney to court to tell this to me in person, and only then am I gonna believe you. And that is a real change. And so I think you could imagine a similar shift, let's say, in the law of supremacy Clause immunity, where judges are skeptical that they might want to give states a little more leeway in pursuing these cases against federal officials. And so the question to me is, is this kind of destruction of the integrity and of the skill and care of the Justice Department going to have a really long tail, not only in terms of the Justice Department's sort of institutional capacity, but also in really eating away at the federal government ability to bring cases, get the trust of judges? Are we going to come out of this seeing actually a federal government that has been really weakened in some ways?
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C
So that's something to track in the future. And I guess my last question about that scenario, does that mean that the states then take a greater role in holding government agents accountable?
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B
I think you could absolutely imagine that depending on how this litigation unfolds and taking a step back, I think it makes sense to see this fight over Supremacy Clause immunity as one aspect of this much bigger rebalancing of power that's going to come out of this administration. In the same way that judges are more skeptical toward federal prosecutors, maybe they'll also be inclined to allow states to prosecute federal officials. And so in that way, the Trump administration's aggression has upended a lot of the traditional assumptions that of kind, kind of were the backbone of the legal system. And now we're going to see what comes next. And in some ways, that's unexpected and uncertain. And in other ways, it's also part of a long back and forth of expansion and contraction of federal and state power that's taken place over the course of American history and really for as long as the US Government has existed and even before that. And so these fights are important. They have a lot at stake. They're not abstract. It raises questions about how we protect civil rights, the state protecting you from the federal government or the other way around. And right now, I think the question is not only what this balance might look like at the end of the Trump era, but whether we might see some kind of rebalancing again after Trump and Blanche are gone and how that might shape our thinking about the responsibility and the role of government.
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C
Well, Quinta, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [33:31]
B
Thank you for having me.
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C
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudina Baid. Sam Fentress fact checked. Rob Smirciak engineered and provided original music. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio. And Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And a reminder, Radio Atlantic now comes out twice a week. You'll hear my co host, Adam Hannah Harris on Mondays. You can also watch him on YouTube. Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to the atlantic@theatlantic.com listener. I'm Hanna Rosen.
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B
Thank you for listening.