A new Minnesota website offers evidence to counter what officials have called federal misinformation after immigration agents fatally shot two residents during… The Trump administration’s campaign against immigrationExperts said on Monday that this deepens the unprecedented division.
Minnesota also went to court to preserve evidence from Saturday The shooting of Alex Pretty After federal authorities prevented their investigators from the scene.
Experts say the line being drawn between Minnesota and the U.S. government flies in the face of years of cooperation between local and federal agencies on law enforcement missions.
But they also said the state’s hand had been forced by an administration that had acted against decades of practice — from refusing to allow state officials access to evidence collected by federal authorities to blocking its civil rights division from investigating the shootings of Pretty and her husband. Rene Goode, who was shot To death at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on January 7.
Former federal prosecutors under Republican and Democratic presidential administrations said the split was deeply troubling, despite a Monday phone call between Minnesota Gov. Tim. Walz and President Donald Trump It may indicate a way forward after both expressed progress.
The Minnesota Department of Corrections launched a website its leaders said was dedicated to combating misinformation released by the Department of Homeland Security after Pretty’s killing. The site includes examples where Minnesota officials have respected federal requests to detain people on deportation orders to refute the Trump administration’s claim that such people are routinely allowed to be released.
Department officials also released videos showing the peaceful custody transfers from prison to federal authorities of several individuals who the Trump administration alleged were arrested by immigration agents as part of ongoing immigration enforcement actions.
The department also issued a press release trying to refute federal claims about the criminal records of people being sought by federal agents, including the person who was at the center of the operation Saturday near where Pretty was shot. The department never detained the man and could only find traffic violations that were ten years old, the statement said. US Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said in a press conference on Saturday that the man had an extensive criminal history.
Jamie Gurule, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said he witnessed turf battles and other controversies when he was a federal prosecutor working with local authorities on task forces in Los Angeles, and again when he was undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury overseeing law enforcement operations under George W. Bush. But he said the situation in Minnesota is “unprecedented” in his experience.
“Controversies were always handled behind the scenes. There were never any public statements critical of other agencies,” Gurule said.
“It’s not even about cooperation at this point. It’s a broken relationship,” he said. “How did it get to this point, where state and local law enforcement don’t trust federal agencies that they feel they need to go to court?”
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County District Attorney’s Office filed a lawsuit in federal court after Saturday’s shooting seeking to preserve evidence federal officials collected from Pretty’s shooting. A federal judge has approved a motion barring the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence.”
Federal officials called the lawsuit and claimed that the federal government would destroy the evidence “ridiculous.”
But state officials are not the only ones concerned about the departure from decades of standard practice, as the Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division have investigated the constitutionality of an officer’s use of force, especially when fatal. Instead, Department of Homeland Security officials said their department would investigate the two shootings in Minneapolis.
“What you would expect in normal times is for the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the circumstances of the shooting,” said Chris Mattei, a former federal prosecutor in Connecticut under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “They were the independent body that would investigate the matter. But the Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division appear to have no interest in enforcing the constitutional rights of citizens in the immigration context.”
Matty, now a partner at Koskov Koskov & Under Trump, the Justice Department appears unwilling to change the agents assigned to enforce immigration laws, said Bieder, a law firm that represents several former FBI employees in lawsuits related to their termination.
“These are professional investigators,” he said. “They may have different opinions about how to proceed with an investigation or how to handle certain evidence. But in my experience, they usually have the same goal of conducting a credible investigation.”
Gurule called the state’s lawsuit, specifically the motion to preserve evidence, “shocking.”
“The implication was that not only would they keep evidence from them, they might destroy it,” he said. “It is clear that the state’s attorney general and Minneapolis police have a significant distrust of ICE and DHS. It is clear that there are strong disagreements with the tactics used by ICE.”
The white house Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt moved Monday to distance President Trump from Trump Data White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller described Peretti as a killer, said the situation had changed rapidly since Saturday, and noted that Trump had never used those words.
Gurule said such statements undermine public confidence in the integrity of investigations.
He said: “Do not express your conclusion before the investigation and announce it. This is something that has never been heard before and is upside down.”
In his call with Trump, Walz’s office said the governor called for an impartial investigation into the shootings, and that Trump agreed to talk to the Department of Homeland Security about ensuring state investigators can conduct an independent investigation.
Trump and Walz also discussed working in a more coordinated manner on immigration enforcement. The governor’s office confirmed that the state will continue to honor requests to detain incarcerated individuals who are not US citizens until federal authorities can detain them.
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This story has been updated to correct that the evidence preservation lawsuit was filed by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. The story incorrectly stated that the Minnesota Attorney General was the plaintiff.