Prosecution of ICE agents in Minnesota is uncharted legal territory
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A second ICE agent is now facing state criminal charges for actions during “Operation Metro Surge.” On Monday, charges were filed against Christian J. Castro, who is accused of shooting and wounding a Venezuelan man in north Minneapolis in January. He’s also charged with allegedly lying to law enforcement about the incident.
In April, ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. was charged with assault for allegedly pointing his gun at two people during a February road rage incident.
A judge has issued nationwide warrants for the arrests of both agents.
What happens next is unclear. Lauren Bonds is executive director of the National Police Accountability Project. She said it’s novel legal territory. Bonds joined Minnesota Now to explain.
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The following was edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
What challenges do you foresee in getting these agents extradited to Minnesota?
It depends a little bit on where the agents are. If they're in a jurisdiction where local law enforcement or the state attorney in that state is willing to cooperate and work and help with Minnesota to get folks back. But it definitely makes things more difficult.
Does ICE have an obligation to turn them in if they’re still working for the agency?
I think that there is probably a pretty high likelihood that these folks are still working for ICE. Whether they're on administrative leave or actively working as ICE agents, it's unclear.
But we've gotten no indication that there's been terminations or discipline. I think that there's been some statements that they could be subject to discipline, that they could be subject to an investigation, but it's very possible that they're still employed.
This kind of question of whether ICE would have an obligation as their employer to turn them over, or if they have an obligation to cooperate with local law enforcement prosecution efforts.
I don't know if there's any authority for the state to say, “ICE has to cooperate and produce their employees or make them show up for court.” So I think that might be difficult to say that they have some kind of obligation to do that outside of any kind of memorandum of agreement or cooperative agreement between the county and ICE.
There is a chance this case moves to federal court. What would that mean?
Once the Supremacy Clause is invoked — which I think is kind of what everyone is anticipating here — the case will go to federal court. And kind of the question that the federal court is asking is whether the conduct that is the subject of the prosecution — so in this case the shooting through the door — whether that was within the scope of the ICE agent's employment and whether it was constitutionally permissible conduct under the federal constitution.
The state would still be involved, but there would be important federal questions that would be answered during that process. So it would be deciding this question of federal constitutional law before the state criminal law issues could be resolved.
In late March, Minnesota sued the Trump administration for evidence in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Do you think Minnesota will be successful in getting that evidence related to those two cases?
That is difficult to predict, just because a lot of this is really novel. These aren't the kind of cases that federal courts have had to deal with in the past because there's been such a great deal of cooperation between local and federal law enforcement.
I'm not aware of any kind of past cases outside of Ruby Ridge in 1992, where you know a local law enforcement agency has had to sue for information. And so you know, I think that this is going to be kind of breaking new ground in a lot of ways in the federal court.
What do you think the state of federal law enforcement accountability is right now?
I do think that it is difficult to hold federal law enforcement accountable, particularly if you are an elected official. And I think that that's one of the reasons that you're seeing a lot of states kind of thinking about what they can do to empower communities to hold federal law enforcement accountable on their own through civil rights actions.
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