Minnesota officials sue federal government over Renee Good, Alex Pretti investigations

Minnesota state and county officials sued the federal government Tuesday, alleging they are being blocked from investigating the shootings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis by federal agents.

In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County District Attorney Mary Moriarty and Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans alleged that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have blocked state investigators from accessing the evidence they need in order to investigate the three shootings.

The lawsuit names the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who presided over the immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.

A spokesperson for DHS said that every use-of-force incident and discharge of an ICE firearm “must be properly reported and reviewed by the agency in accordance with agency policy, procedure, and guidelines.” 

“All shootings are initially reviewed by an appropriate law enforcement agency,” the spokesperson continued. “Following a review of the incident by the appropriate investigative agency, ICE and CBP conduct an independent review of the critical incident.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department could not be immediately reached for comment.

The FBI declined to comment.

Good and Pretti were both fatally shot by federal agents employed by DHS earlier this year as part of an immigration operation known as Operation Metro Surge. Sosa-Celis was wounded in a shooting by a federal agent during the same operation.

DHS said in a statement regarding Good’s shooting that video footage corroborated the department’s allegation that Good “was impeding law enforcement and weaponized her vehicle in an attempt to kill or cause bodily harm to federal law enforcement,” and that the officer who shot her had done so in self defense. DHS said the matter is still under investigation.

The department said that the FBI is leading the Pretti investigation with the support of Homeland Security Investigations, and Customs and Border Protection is also investigating separately.  

The lawsuit lays out in detail the ways in which the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, or BCA, was blocked at every turn from accessing evidence in each of those three cases.

When the FBI first started to investigate the shooting of Good, the bureau initially agreed to share evidence and cooperate with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension as part of its parallel investigation into whether her killing was legally justified.

In an abrupt shift from historical practice, however, the FBI reversed course the same day — blocking BCA investigators from sitting in on key witness interviews or accessing evidence collected at the scene.

The probe was later shut down, and multiple federal prosecutors resigned in protest, after they were pressured to cease investigating Good’s death as a civil rights case and were ordered to investigate Good’s wife and treat it like a case of an assault on a federal officer, CBS News previously reported.

To this day, state and county officials alleged in the lawsuit, Good’s car is sitting in shrink-wrap inside an FBI storage facility in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and has “never been examined or processed.” 

“The BCA has repeatedly asked the FBI to provide them with Ms. Good’s car or to allow the BCA to execute their search warrant on the car. FBI officials have either refused or not responded to these requests,” the lawsuit says, adding that the FBI recently informed the office that all of the evidence will only be turned over to the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s office.

After the shooting of Good, Venezuelan national Sosa-Celis was shot and wounded by a federal agent on Jan. 14. 

The lawsuit claims that initially, federal officials were poised to cooperate on this incident with state investigators — including even allowing BCA and FBI agents to be “paired into teams” so they could begin interviewing witnesses and canvassing the scene.

But that cooperation quickly stopped after the assistant special agent in charge in the FBI’s Minnesota field office ordered it to end, the lawsuit alleges.

Although BCA collected as much information as it could, some of the key evidence still remains with the federal government, the lawsuit says.

Initially, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Sosa-Celis and accused him of attacking the federal agent who shot him, but those charges were dismissed in February after prosecutors claimed they had unearthed “newly discovered evidence” that did not support the case.

A DHS spokesperson said that a joint review of video evidence by ICE and the Justice Department “revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements.” DHS said both officers were put on administrative leave until an internal investigation is completed, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office is investigating.

Pretti, the former ICU nurse, was the third person to be shot by federal agents in a matter of weeks during the immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

Initially, the Justice Department did not open an investigation into Pretti’s death, allowing DHS to take the lead in investigating its own two federal agents, and BCA investigators were blocked from accessing the crime scene or interviewing the agents involved in Pretti’s death.

“To date, the federal government has not provided the identities of the masked federal agents who shot Mr. Pretti to the BCA or HCAO,” the lawsuit says.

The Justice Department relented later that month amid mounting pressure, and Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche announced that the probe would be handled in part by the Civil Rights Division, whose criminal section specializes in probing color-of-law claims against law enforcement officers.

Several days after the Justice Department announced it would investigate, state officials claim they were told by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the local FBI that the government hoped to resume normal evidence-sharing practices for the Pretti case.

But then, the Justice Department had sent a lawyer from Washington, D.C., to coordinate the federal response to the state’s request, and soon the tone shifted, according to the lawsuit.

“The U.S. Attorney conveyed that evidence would be shared in only one direction: DOJ expected the BCA to share its evidence with federal authorities, but federal authorities had no intention of sharing their evidence with the State,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit does not name the attorney from Washington. 

CBS News has previously reported that the Civil Rights Division dispatched Brandon Wrobelski — a lawyer in its Employment Litigation Section who has no experience with federal criminal cases — to work on the Pretti investigation.

The lawsuit says that after all efforts to obtain evidence in the three cases failed, the Hennepin County District Attorney’s Office tried a more formal approach and issued what are known as “Touhy” requests to DHS and the Justice Department.

Touhy requests, named after a Supreme Court case, refer to the regulatory process used to seek testimony or documents for use in litigation or investigations in which the government agency is not a party.

The Justice Department to date has not responded to the requests. DHS punted the request for information on the Good case to the Justice Department, while failing to respond to requests in the two other cases, the lawsuit says.

“DOJ has not identified any lawful basis that would justify their refusal to share evidence with Plaintiffs related to the shootings of Ms. Good, Mr. Pretti, or Mr. Sosa-Celis. Nor did DOJ provide a lawful justification for its dramatic departure from prior long-standing practice of state-federal cooperation and evidence sharing,” the lawsuit says.

The complaint accuses the government of violating the Administrative Procedure Act by acting in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner that is not in accordance with the law. 

It also alleges the federal government unlawfully withheld and unreasonably delayed agency action and violated the 10th Amendment, which imposes federal limits on states’ authority.