What About the Renee Good Shooting?
The Star Tribune’s Jeff Day broke the news last night that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and FBI are set to announce a joint investigation into the killing of Alex Pretti, citing two anonymous sources.
No date or time has been set for any announcement as of this morning, so this appears to be still a tentative, if not contingent, agreement. But the prospect of state investigators being included after being shut out for the past two weeks would mark a breakthrough that offers a glimmer of potential for an independent investigation and some accountability.
It remains unclear, according to Day, whether the agreement on the Pretti shooting probe would include a joint investigation of the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good or otherwise make available to state investigators the evidence collected by the feds in the earlier shooting.
As Day reports:
One of the most startling aspects of the tension between the state and federal government was the decision by the Justice Department to not allow the BCA Force Investigations Unit to have access to crime scene or investigative materials that were gathered by federal agents at both crime scenes — a decision that ruptured the longstanding cooperative relationship between the two agencies.
The prospect of a joint federal-state investigation comes after CBP commander Gregory Bovino was removed from Minnesota and replaced by White House border czar Tom Homan, who despite his own bellicose track record has toned down in recent days the harshest rhetoric coming from the administration.
A federal civil rights investigation into the Pretti shooting was reluctantly announced last week by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche after days of public outrage and slippage amongst some elected Republicans in their previous unambiguous support for the administration’s brutal and lawless mass deportation operation.
Whether the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the FBI are conducting the belated investigation in accordance with past practices remains a big unknown. But it is abundantly clear that the Trump DOJ does not operate free of interference and direction from the Trump White House, which makes any federal investigation inherently suspect and the need for an independent state investigation with full access to the evidence critical.
Mass Deportation Watch: Minnesota Edition
- Immigrants apprehended in Operation Metro Surge are being sent to a massive detention center on Fort Bliss Army Base then released in El Paso to find their way home, the NYT reports.
- Star Tribune: Swapped, covered and removed: The license plate tactics ICE is using in Minnesota
- The announced withdrawal of hundreds of federal agents from Minnesota has had no discernible impact on the pace of deportation operations on the ground, the NYT reports.
- Politico: “U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, in a little-noticed filing last week with the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, said his office is buckling under the crushing weight of hundreds of emergency lawsuits filed by immigrants arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in recent weeks.”
The Retribution: Abrego Garcia-Style
The Trump administration is retaliating against recently freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his family for becoming a poster boy for the brutality of Operation Metro Surge by seeking to end their asylum claims and expedite the deportation proceedings against them, MPR reports.
Mass Deportation Watch: Nationwide Edition
- Wired: ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are
- Philadelphia Inquirer: “Federal judges in Philadelphia have been unusually outspoken in recent weeks about what they call the ‘illegal’ policy by ICE of mandating detention for nearly all undocumented immigrants — and have been sharply critical of the ‘unsound’ arguments by government attorneys seeking to justify the approach.”
- WSJ: “The Trump administration is attempting to eliminate most opportunities for immigrants with deportation orders to appeal their cases under a new policy, the latest step by the government to strip immigrants of due process rights so they can be deported more quickly.”
Why Schedule F Is Still a Big Problem
The original ambitions of the Trump’s first-term proposal for a Schedule F designation for senior government workers that makes them easier to fire seems almost quaint now, given the mass politicization of the federal workforce over the past year, but Don Moynihan explains why the Trump II version of the rule change still matters.
Sign Up for The Franchise!
With the midterms elections approaching, TPM is relaunching The Franchise, a weekly newsletter on voting rights and election administration by Khaya Himmelman. If you want to closely follow Trump’s threats to voting, free and fair elections, and election officials, you can sign for free right here.
RIP WaPo
This week’s carnage at Bezo’s WaPo has been dismaying on so many levels: as a D.C. resident, a journalist, a sports fan (Chelsea Janes and Jesse Dougherty were two of the smartest people in media, not just sports media), and a sentimental fool who appreciated its few surviving anachronisms from the mid-20th century heyday of major metro daily newspapers. The best of those survivors was Martin Weil, who started at the paper in 1965. Erik Wemple has a loving tribute to the 60-year newspaperman who was laid off this week, too.
Scenes From a Personalist Regime
President Trump, who for months has been holding hostage federal funding for a major rail tunnel project between New York and New Jersey, has a new ransom demand: If you want the money, rename NYC’s Penn Station and Washington-Dulles International Airport after me.
Trump Posts Racist Vid of Obamas as Apes
On the same day it was reported that the National Park Service is editing visitor brochures to no longer label the klansman who murdered Medgar Evers a “racist,” President Trump posted a 2020 Big Lie video on social media that portrays Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
Amen
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