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Minutes after a federal agent shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in a Chicago suburb last September, a group of police officers stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out the answer to a question of protocol: Who would investigate the shooting?
“Wouldn’t it be state’s, at a minimum?” one Franklin Park officer asked, according to body camera footage.
Chief Mike Witz shook his head. “No, because it’s a federal shooting,” he said. “You’re not going to investigate a federal officer.”
His officers didn’t investigate. In their report, they didn’t even note the names of the two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the scene of Silverio Villegas González’s death. Instead, they deferred to the FBI.
Local law enforcement officials also did not investigate when a Border Patrol agent shot and wounded a U.S. citizen in her car in Chicago less than a month later. Or when an ICE agent in Phoenix shot a Honduran man during a traffic stop later that month.
In fact, local police did not open investigations into six of the 12 shootings by on-duty federal agents that have led to the deaths or injuries of citizens and immigrants since September, a ProPublica analysis found. In three other shooting cases, state or local police said they have opened inquiries, which they called a routine practice in those jurisdictions. And in Minnesota, where ICE and Border Patrol shot and killed two U.S. citizens and injured a Venezuelan man last month, state police have tried to conduct independent investigations only to be thwarted by the Trump administration, which has gone so far as to block officers from a scene, even when they had a judicial warrant.
In almost every instance, President Donald Trump’s administration blamed the injured and dead for the shooting within hours of the incident, raising questions about whether federal officials can fairly and objectively investigate their own. Legal experts and advocates for immigrants say this apparent lack of accountability demands that local authorities step up and exercise their power to investigate and prosecute federal agents who break state laws — from battery to murder.
“Local police and the state have gotten a free pass,” said Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the co-founder and director of its Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. “Residents have every right and should be demanding that, ‘Hey, state authorities, police, local police: Protect us. Arrest people who kill us, who batter us, who point guns at us and threaten and assault us without legal cause to do so.’”
It’s usually the opposite scenario: federal authorities coming in to investigate a troubled police department. But local authorities have investigated and charged federal agents in the past. It’s just rare and complicated. The federal supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution bars local interference with federal law enforcement officers when they act reasonably and within the scope of their duties.
But given the aggressive tactics employed by immigration agents under the Trump administration, Futterman and other legal experts said local police and prosecutors are morally obligated to at least try to hold federal law enforcement officers accountable.
“We’re in an environment right now where ICE officers are blatantly and egregiously violating the Constitution and the law,” said Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The federal government has made it very clear that they are not going to do anything to provide any sort of accountability backstop to its officers. Unfortunately, because Congress is not taking any steps to rein ICE officers in, there really is no option other than states protecting their constituents’ rights.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that agents are “trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers.” All use-of-force incidents are properly reported and reviewed by an appropriate law enforcement agency, the spokesperson said.
Immigration agents at the border have long been criticized for use of deadly force and lack of rigorous investigations afterward. But now the same militarized force is on display in major American cities far from the border, where residents are not used to their presence.
The shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month — and the federal government’s resistance to a routine local investigation — has prompted Democratic and some Republican officials across the country to call for more accountability. Last week, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order directing police officers to document alleged illegal activity by federal immigration agents and refer any evidence of felonies to prosecutors.
California’s governor and attorney general issued a reminder to local police of their rights to investigate federal agents. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes launched a website asking residents to submit evidence of federal agents’ misconduct. And prosecutors from nine jurisdictions around the country announced a new coalition to provide mutual support to law enforcement authorities bringing charges against federal officers.
In Minneapolis, prosecutors say they’re working with state police to investigate in spite of resistance from federal officials. So far, DHS officials have refused to provide evidence or even the names of the agents involved in the January shootings. Prosecutors went so far as to obtain an emergency order to require that federal agencies preserve evidence in the Pretti case. A judge dropped the temporary restraining order on Monday, following assurances from the federal government that it would maintain investigative materials.
The prosecutors said they believe they can still gather enough evidence to make an informed decision about whether to charge the federal agents.
“We get cases submitted to us every day that don’t have all the evidence we would like,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in an interview. “We would certainly like the gun. We would like the shell casings, that kind of thing. But it’s also not a mystery as to why these people died.”
Even after getting a judicial warrant, investigators from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension were turned away by federal agents from the Minneapolis intersection where Pretti, 37, was shot and killed. Federal officials also excluded the BCA from the investigation into the death of Renee Good, who was shot and killed in her car two weeks before Pretti.
BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said he’d never seen his officers physically stopped from doing their job by another law enforcement agency. Across the country, he said, state agencies like the BCA routinely investigate deadly force incidents like this one.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said.
Within hours of each killing, Trump officials publicly labeled the dead “domestic terrorists.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a gun when he approached the officers, while the Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti was planning a “massacre.”
Video footage contradicted the administration’s version of events. Pretti, for instance, never unholstered his gun, which he was legally allowed to carry.
Early last week, Trump sent Bovino and Border Patrol agents away from Minneapolis, and on Wednesday DHS officials said they would pull another 700 agents out of the state — signs the administration may be changing its approach in response to rising criticism. The FBI is now investigating the Pretti shooting, and the Justice Department announced Friday that it had opened a civil rights investigation.
A DOJ spokesperson did not answer questions for this story but referred reporters to a press conference last weekend in which Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said DHS is following its normal investigative protocols in the Pretti shooting.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has said it has no plans to investigate Good’s shooting.
“We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody putting his life in danger,” Blanche told Fox News.
Police in Franklin Park and Chicago have not explained why they didn’t open their own investigations into the two shootings last fall. In the Franklin Park case, the decision to let the FBI alone investigate the killing of Villegas was made within minutes of the shooting, according to dispatch records.
Villegas, a 38-year-old restaurant cook, was shot as he tried to drive away from ICE agents who had pulled him over. As in Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s narrative of what happened did not match the evidence. DHS claimed that Villegas dragged one of the agents, causing serious injuries. The agent fired “because he feared for his life,” officials said. Police body camera footage released after the shooting showed the agent downplaying his injury as “nothing major.”
At the scene, Franklin Park police officers directed traffic and interviewed a witness, the footage shows. At one point, one officer told his colleague that the police department was “just securing until they get here,” referring to the FBI.
Witz, who was then the police chief but has since retired, could not be reached for comment; the current chief did not respond to interview requests.
A similar situation unfolded in Chicago on Oct. 4 after a Border Patrol agent fired into the vehicle of a woman who federal officials claimed “ambushed” them. Marimar Martinez was charged with assaulting federal agents, though the charges were later dropped.
At the time, the Chicago Police Department said officers had responded to a call about a shooting “to document the incident” and to “maintain safety and traffic control.” When asked last week why it didn’t open an independent inquiry, the department directed ProPublica to its October statement, which made clear the police were “not involved in the incident or its investigation” and directed questions to federal authorities.
As the events in Minneapolis continued to generate criticism nationwide, Chicago’s mayor unveiled his executive order that directed officers to investigate federal immigration agents who break the law and to refer them for criminal prosecution. In a statement, the mayor’s office said the initiative was a response to “the absence of legal repercussions in the wake of the shooting of Marimar Martinez in Chicago and the killings of Silverio Villegas González in Franklin Park and Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.”
Legal experts said they were not aware of recent examples of Illinois law enforcement agencies investigating an on-duty federal agent, though last month a suburban police department obtained misdemeanor charges against an off-duty ICE agent accused of attacking an activist who was filming him while the agent was pumping gas.
Illinois State Police officials said they would investigate federal agents who were accused of breaking the law if they are asked to do so.
Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker called on a state accountability commission to examine the roles of key Trump officials in the escalation of aggressive tactics during a monthslong immigration enforcement campaign in Chicago and its suburbs late last year. Pritzker had previously established the commission to gather videos and testimonies about federal agents’ conduct, and to create a public record of what happened. The commission lacks subpoena power but can refer information about potential violations of state law to law enforcement agencies or prosecutors.
“Just imagine if the agents who shot Mr. Villegas González back on Sept. 12 had been publicly disciplined,” Rubén Castillo, a retired federal judge who chairs the commission, said at a hearing Friday. “Maybe, just maybe, the Minnesota shootings would not have occurred, and two people would be alive who are now dead.”
He added: “We will have conversations with those in local law enforcement to suggest prosecutions that should be occurring even as we speak.”
In California, neither the Los Angeles nor Ontario police departments investigated after two men were shot by federal immigration agents in separate October incidents and then accused of assaulting federal officers — despite video evidence and victim statements that conflicted with the accounts officials provided. A federal judge dismissed the case against one man, a Mexican immigrant and popular TikTokker; the other, a U.S. citizen, pleaded not guilty and has a trial scheduled for April.
Police in Phoenix also said they are not investigating the shooting of a man who federal officials say fled immigration agents last October, leaving the case to the FBI and ICE. And local police in Portland, Oregon, are not investigating an incident where federal agents shot at a Venezuelan man who had allegedly hit an unoccupied Border Patrol vehicle with his car in early January, injuring him and his passenger. The man was later charged with assaulting an officer. Unlike in some of the other cases, the Oregon attorney general’s office has opened its own investigation.
In contrast, police in Pima County, Arizona, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and the Texas Rangers have all said they opened investigations into recent shootings involving federal immigration officers.
Asking local officials to investigate their federal counterparts does not come without challenges. Police officers and prosecutors are wary of being seen as interfering with federal law enforcement operations. They may be reluctant to damage their already complicated relationships with agencies with whom they sometimes partner.
Then there’s the worry about the political consequences, including the threat of losing federal funding, a dynamic that’s particularly acute under the Trump administration.
“This particular federal government has lobbed all kinds of threats and acted on threats against local authorities and state authorities for failure to cooperate or not do what they want them to do,” said Futterman, the University of Chicago law professor. “It’s a reason in itself not to bite a hand that feeds you.”
Even when local officials open their own investigations into federal agents, there’s no guarantee they can bring the cases to court. Federal agents can claim immunity in response to state charges, legal experts said, and can move their cases to federal court.
That immunity stems from a Supreme Court ruling more than a century ago. During the Civil Rights Movement, that immunity was used when the federal government wanted to protect its law enforcement officers tasked with enforcing then-controversial efforts like desegregation in hostile states.
Now local officials face the opposite challenge: protecting their constituents’ constitutional rights from what they believe is excessive force at the hands of federal officers.
Steve Descano, the commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax County, Virginia, would be the first to admit that nothing about prosecuting federal agents is easy. During the first Trump administration, Descano brought state manslaughter charges against two U.S. Park Police officers who shot and killed a Virginia man. A federal judge dismissed the case in 2021 and said the officers were entitled to immunity because their actions were necessary and proper.
Still, Descano, who is part of the coalition of prosecutors aiming to hold federal law enforcement accountable, said he believed he and others have a responsibility to do so.
“If they are not willing to take these actions,” he said, “then they are cowards and they are not worthy of their positions.”
