Minnesota Federal Prosecutors Resign Over ICE
Minnesota federal prosecutors resign ICE shooting
A wave of high-level resignations has paralyzed the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota following a bitter internal dispute over the federal investigation into the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent. On Tuesday, January 13, 2026, six career prosecutors, including the office’s second-in-command and its most prominent fraud investigators, officially stepped down in protest of the Justice Department’s refusal to launch a civil rights inquiry into the incident. The departures were led by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson, the veteran prosecutor who gained national recognition for exposing the $250 million “Feeding Our Future” fraud scandal. Thompson was joined by Harry Jacobs, the chief of the office’s criminal division, and several other senior attorneys, including Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider, and Tom Hollenhurst. The mass exodus marks an unprecedented breakdown in the relationship between career non-partisan officials in Minneapolis and the political leadership of the Trump administration’s Department of Justice.
The resignations were reportedly triggered by a series of directives from U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen and senior DOJ officials in Washington that career prosecutors viewed as a betrayal of their professional integrity. Sources close to the office indicated that Thompson and his colleagues were deeply disturbed by a mandate to treat the January 7 shooting as an “assault on a federal officer”—framing the agent, Jonathan Ross, as the victim—rather than investigating whether the use of deadly force against Good was a violation of her civil rights. Furthermore, the prosecutors allegedly faced pressure from the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into Good’s widow and other activist groups to identify potential ties to “domestic terrorism.” The tension reached a breaking point when the FBI reportedly refused to allow investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) to participate in the probe, a move the resigning attorneys argued was designed to shield federal agents from state-level accountability.
Governor Tim Walz and other state leaders have condemned the loss of these career professionals, characterizing the resignations as a direct result of the President pushing out non-partisan experts to make room for political loyalists. Walz described the departure of Joseph Thompson as a “huge loss” for Minnesota, noting that Thompson had served as the state’s acting U.S. Attorney for several months in 2025 and possessed unparalleled institutional knowledge of complex criminal networks. The Governor suggested that the administration is effectively “decapitating” the office responsible for holding corrupt actors accountable in order to protect its own immigration enforcement agenda. Senator Amy Klobuchar also weighed in, stating that the family of Renee Nicole Good deserves a fair and impartial investigation rather than “political attacks” that seek to blame the victim before the facts are fully established.
The turmoil in Minnesota coincides with a similar crisis in Washington, D.C., where four top leaders of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division also resigned this week. Those officials reportedly left after Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon sidelined their unit from the Minneapolis investigation, declaring that there was “no basis” for a federal civil rights probe. As the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis loses its most experienced leadership, legal experts warn that major pending cases—including racketeering trials against street gangs and ongoing fraud investigations—could face significant delays or complications. For the residents of Minneapolis, the mass resignation of their top federal prosecutors reinforces a sense of deep distrust in the federal government’s ability to provide a transparent accounting of the events that led to the death of a citizen in their community.
