Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow
Joseph H. Thompson, a career federal prosecutor who was the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota last year, was among those who resigned as the Justice Department sought to examine the woman’s...
Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter, according to people with knowledge of their decision.
Joseph H. Thompson, who was second in command at the U.S. attorney’s office and oversaw a sprawling fraud investigation that has roiled Minnesota’s political landscape, was among those who quit on Tuesday, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Mr. Thompson’s resignation came after senior Justice Department officials pressed for a criminal investigation into the actions of the widow of Renee Nicole Good, the Minneapolis woman killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
Mr. Thompson, 47, a career prosecutor, objected to that approach, as well as to the Justice Department’s refusal to include state officials in investigating whether the shooting itself was lawful, the people familiar with his decision said.
The Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, said in an interview that Mr. Thompson’s resignation dealt a major blow to efforts to root out rampant theft from state agencies. The fraud cases, which involve schemes to cheat safety net programs, were the chief reason the Trump administration cited for its immigration crackdown in the state. The vast majority of defendants charged in the cases are American citizens of Somali origin.
“When you lose the leader responsible for making the fraud cases, it tells you this isn’t really about prosecuting fraud,” Mr. O’Hara said.
The other senior career prosecutors who resigned include Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Mr. Jacobs had been Mr. Thompson’s deputy overseeing the fraud investigation, which began in 2022. Mr. Calhoun-Lopez was the chief of the violent and major crimes unit.
Mr. Thompson, Mr. Jacobs, Ms. Williams and Mr. Calhoun-Lopez declined to discuss the reasons they resigned. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tuesday’s resignations followed tumultuous days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota as prosecutors there and in Washington struggled to manage the outrage over Ms. Good’s killing, which set off angry protests in Minnesota and across the nation.
After Ms. Good was shot, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told her staff that she would not consider opening an investigation into whether the agent had violated federal law, according to three current and former department officials who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the situation. At least four prosecutors who had already intended to quit or retire signaled they would accelerate their departures, those officials said.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement that “there is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE agent.
Instead, the Justice Department launched an investigation to examine ties between Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, and several groups that have been monitoring and protesting the conduct of immigration agents in recent weeks. Shortly after Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, referred to Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist.”
Becca Good said in a statement last week that she and her wife had “stopped to support our neighbors” when they got into a tense confrontation with ICE agents that led to the shooting. “We had whistles,” Becca Good wrote. “They had guns.”
Mr. Thompson strenuously objected to the decision not to investigate the shooting as a civil rights matter, and was outraged by the demand to launch a criminal investigation into Becca Good, according to the people familiar with the developments, who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
Mr. Thompson had originally set out to investigate the shooting in partnership with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that reviews police shootings. Senior Justice Department officials overruled the decision to cooperate with the state agency.
Drew Evans, the superintendent of the bureau, called Mr. Thompson’s departure a major setback for the effort to root out fraud in the state and for public safety.
“We’re losing a true public servant,” said Mr. Evans. “We really need professional prosecutors.”
The absence of a credible and comprehensive investigation into Ms. Good’s killing stands to “undermine trust in our public safety agencies,” Mr. Evans added.
Mr. Thompson’s departure came during the chaotic immigration crackdown in Minnesota, which has angered many residents and left officials bracing for an escalation of violence.
Begun in December with the deployment of roughly 100 federal agents from out of state, the operation has swelled to include some 2,000 federal agents. By comparison, the Minneapolis Police Department has roughly 600 officers.
Local leaders and immigrant rights groups have decried the agents’ conduct, saying that they have been stopping people based only on looks and accents. Often, these stops have led to the violent arrest of both immigrants and American citizens, according to local officials and observers who have recorded mayhem using cell phones.
On Monday, Minnesota’s attorney general and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding an end to the crackdown, asserting that it had led to numerous abuses and civil rights violations.
The Minneapolis police chief, Mr. O’Hara, told The New York Times in an interview that the operation could lead to more deaths and the kind of widespread civil unrest that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
The Trump administration has cited the fraud investigation that Mr. Thompson led to justify the surge of agents, which federal officials have called the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.
Most of the defendants charged to date are of Somali ancestry, but are American citizens by birth or naturalization.
President Trump and several top aides have seized on the matter to argue that Somalis are swindling the nation. Mr. Trump has called Somalis “garbage,” and he said his administration was considering denaturalizing some, because, he says, “they hate our country.”
Mr. Thompson grew frustrated in recent weeks as the immigration surge became a distraction for the office’s work on fraud, undermining the goal the administration said it was trying to pursue, according to people familiar with his thinking.
The fraud cases — which involve plots to bill state agencies for safety net services that were never provided — have cost taxpayers several billion dollars, according to Mr. Thompson.
After new facets of the investigation came to light this fall, the scandal became a major crisis for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who has struggled to explain why so much money was stolen on his watch.
Mr. Walz, a Democrat who had been hoping to win a third term in November, sought for months to weather the scandal by strengthening safeguards.
But this month, facing threats and investigations from federal agencies, the governor suspended his campaign. Mr. Walz said he concluded that the work of rooting out fraud demanded his entire attention during the final year of his term, which will end shortly after the end of this year.
Mr. Walz lamented Mr. Thompson’s resignation on Tuesday, calling him “a principled public servant who spent more than a decade achieving justice for Minnesotans.” He added: “It’s also the latest sign Trump is pushing nonpartisan career professionals out of the justice department, replacing them with his sycophants.”
Mr. Thompson’s departure is a major blow to the effort. A self-described workaholic, he has encyclopedic knowledge of dozens of investigations involving a complex web of defendants and transactions.
More than 90 people have been charged since 2022 and at least 60 have been convicted of defrauding programs meant to feed children during the pandemic, aid people at risk of homelessness and treat minors with autism.
As the scandal drew national attention, Mr. Thompson became a high profile figure, earning praise from elected officials across the political spectrum. Several urged him to run for office, something Mr. Thompson — who refuses to discuss his political preferences — has said he has ruled out.
Mr. Thompson, a Stanford-trained lawyer who was born and raised in Minnesota, joined the Justice Department nearly 17 years ago. Before joining the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, he worked in Chicago between 2009 and 2014 prosecuting street gangs, drug cartels, public corruption and domestic terrorism cases.
In 2023, he was assigned to the team that investigated former President Joseph R. Biden for keeping classified documents in his residence and office after his term as vice president ended. That team chose not to criminally charge Mr. Biden, having concluded that his cognitive decline would likely stand in the way of a successful prosecution.
Mr. Thompson was acting U.S. attorney in Minnesota for several months starting in early June, and oversaw cases that included the prosecution of the man accused of assassinating Melissa Hortman, the former speaker of the state House of Representatives.
Glenn Thrush and Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
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This one I can't get to the bottom of... over on Celia Farbers substack they came to the conclusion that nobody died in this incident.