The machinery of justice, designed to turn with the heavy, deliberate gears of impartial fact, has seized. At the center of the deadlock is the killing of a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole Good, shot in her SUV by a federal immigration officer on Jan. 7.
Now, the Trump administration is employing every lever to ensure the man who pulled the trigger, ICE agent Jonathan Ross, is not truly investigated, by putting his own employer and their political allies solely in charge, effectively placing a wall between the act and any independent state scrutiny.
The sequence is a study in calculated control.
After the shooting, Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the agency that investigates all police shootings in the state, arrived on scene alongside the FBI in a standard joint investigation. Within hours, that arrangement was dismantled.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota, an arm of the Trump Justice Department, reversed course. It declared the FBI would be the sole investigative body, freezing out the BCA and seizing control of all evidence.
“The BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” said BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, his agency forced to withdraw. “Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands.”
This maneuver is not a procedural footnote. It is the point.
The administration’s narrative was set before the shell casings were cool.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood in Minneapolis and labeled Good’s actions “domestic terrorism,” claiming Agent Ross, who months earlier had been injured when dragged by a vehicle, “fired defensive shots” to save his life.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who has seen the video footage, called that account “bullshit.”
The video itself shows Good calmly telling agents, “I’m not mad at you,” before slowly driving away as an agent advances and shouts, calling her a “fucking bitch” moments before her life ended with three bullets in her face.
Now, with the state investigators sidelined, the path to accountability is being systematically dismantled.
Governor Tim Walz stated plainly, “Now that Minnesota has been taken out of the investigation, it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome.”
The Hennepin County attorney, Mary Moriarty, who holds local jurisdiction, says she cannot make a charging decision without evidence—evidence now locked within a federal investigation, the administration shows no intent to share.
The FBI has possession of the vehicle, the gun, and the shell casings, which is clearly a cover-up, leaving state prosecutors without access to interview the federal officers involved.
President Trump, when asked if the FBI should share information with Minnesota officials, dismissed the notion. “Well, normally I would,” he said, “but they’re crooked officials.”
Trump’s Justice Department crossed a new threshold with its criminal investigation of top Democratic elected officials in Minnesota, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
Targeting political adversaries is not new for Trump, who failed to harm former FBI Director James Comey or New York Attorney General Leticia James with such stunts.
This obstruction also mirrors a pattern etched deep into this administration’s history. It is the same impulse that led Trump to demand his lawyer falsely tell the National Archives all documents had been returned from Mar-a-Lago.
It is the same reflex that saw witnesses in the Jan. 6 investigation receive calls urging them to be “team players.” It is, as former officials have noted, obstruction as a way of life.
But here, the stakes are mortal, not political. A woman is dead. A GoFundMe for her family has raised over $1.5 million from a public grasping for a form of justice their own government is denying.
The legal doctrine of federal immunity for agents acting within their duties is being weaponized not as a defense in court, but as a barricade against any court ever hearing the case.
The U.S. attorney, according to a 1935 Supreme Court ruling, is “the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.”
That sovereignty’s interest, Justice Sutherland wrote, “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”
In Minneapolis tonight, that obligation reads like ancient scripture. The sovereignty has chosen a side.
It has moved not to discern the truth, but to bury it within its own apparatus.
The message to the public, and to every local prosecutor in the nation, is unmistakable: when federal agents act, they answer only to themselves.
This situation conflicts with the Constitution that — most directly through the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments — enshrines the principle that no person or government official is above the law, and that everyone is entitled to fair treatment and accountability in the justice system.
This is the heart of the phrase often spoken as equal justice under law.
While the words appear on the Supreme Court building, they reflect a broader commitment in American law and democratic norms: legal processes should apply evenly, transparently, and without bias to all people and all officials alike.
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