Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

“The Civil Rights Division exists to enforce civil rights laws that protect all Americans,” one former DOJ attorney said recently. “It doesn’t exist to enact the president’s own agenda.”

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is seeing its latest mass resignation over its handling of the case of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a federal immigration agent last week in Minneapolis.

Days after Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced that the agency’s Civil Rights Division would not be investigating the shooting—despite the fact that the office’s criminal unit would ordinarily probe any abuse or improper use of force by law enforcement—four top officials in the section have resigned.

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As MS NOW reported Monday night, the chief of the criminal unit—listed on the DOJ website as Jim Felte—has resigned, as well as the principal deputy chief, deputy chief, and acting deputy chief. The outlet reported that other decisions by administration officials also contributed to their decision to leave.

The FBI announced late last week that it would be probing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross’ shooting of Good, who was killed while sitting in her car on a street in Minneapolis where ICE was operating—part of a surge of federal immigration agents who have been sent to the area in recent weeks, with the Trump administration largely targeting Somali people.

Despite video evidence showing that Good’s wheels were turned away from Ross, who was one of a number of officers who had approached her car and reportedly given her conflicting orders, the Trump administration is continuing to claim that she purposely tried to drive into the ICE agent and that Ross fired “defensive shots”—something law enforcement agents including ICE officers are trained not to do in situations involving a moving vehicle.

“It is highly unusual for the Civil Rights Division not to be involved from the outset with the FBI and US attorney’s office.”

As administration officials have aggressively pushed a narrative painting Good as a “domestic terrorist”—a designation that ordinarily would never be used by the government until a full investigation had been carried out—the FBI has blocked Minnesota authorities from conducting a probe, leading the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to file a lawsuit Monday.

As the Washington Post reported Monday, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division would typically work alongside the FBI “to guide investigatory strategy” on a case like Good’s. Prosecutors with the division were involved in trying the officers who killed George Floyd in MInneapolis and Tyre Nichols in Memphis.

“It is highly unusual for the Civil Rights Division not to be involved from the outset with the FBI and US attorney’s office,” Vanita Gupta, who led the division during the Obama administration, told the Post. “I cannot think of another high-profile federal agent shooting case like this when the Civil Rights Division was not involved—its prosecutors have the long-standing expertise in such cases.”

Hundreds of attorneys in the Civil Rights Division have resigned since President Donald Trump began his second term a year ago. Stacey Young, a former division attorney who left the DOJ soon after Trump was inaugurated, told NPR that the division is “not an arm of the White House.”

“The Civil Rights Division exists to enforce civil rights laws that protect all Americans,” Young said. “It doesn’t exist to enact the president’s own agenda. That’s a perversion of the separation of powers and the role of an independent Justice Department.”

Dhillon, who has said the division will work to carry out the president’s priorities, said last April that she was “fine” with the mass departure of civil rights attorneys.

“The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws—not woke ideology,” she said.

Dhillon’s announcement that the division would not investigate Good’s killing suggested that the DOJ views probing improper use of force cases as it has in the past as “woke ideology.”

The mass resignation at the Civil Rights Division comes a month after more than 200 former DOJ employees signed an open letter condemning “the near destruction of DOJ’s once-revered crown jewel.”

“The administration wants you to believe that career staff who fled the Division ‘were actively in resistance mode’ and ‘decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do,’” said the former employeees. “That could not be further from the truth. We left because this administration turned the Division’s core mission upside down, largely abandoning its duty to protect civil rights.”

Now in the wake of Good’s killing, said one observer, the division under Dhillon’s leadership “refused to probe a murder. The people with consciences walked out.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

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