Federal agents around the country were told in recent days that the FBI would no longer investigate confrontations involving immigration officers, according to reporting on an internal notice circulated to bureau managers. The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security deny that any such change has occurred.
Both accounts cannot be right, and the dispute is worth setting out plainly, because what is at stake is who investigates federal officers when they use deadly force.
What is reported to have changed
Under the practice described in the reporting, when an ICE officer shot someone, the FBI was tasked with examining the encounter, including whether the officer had been assaulted before firing. That work sometimes produced evidence bearing on whether the officer had broken federal law.
The notice described to reporters would shift responsibility for assault allegations to Homeland Security Investigations, a component of ICE itself. Critics of the reported change point to a specific consequence: DHS does not have jurisdiction to investigate civil rights violations, which is the legal avenue ordinarily used to bring federal charges against agents for excessive force. Routing the work to ICE's own investigative arm would therefore mean the agency examining its own officers, without the mechanism most likely to produce a civil rights prosecution.
The agencies' denial
The Justice Department and DHS issued a joint statement rejecting the account. "The relationship between DHS and DOJ in investigating assault on federal officer cases has not changed, and FBI will continue to investigate in accordance with agency policy," the statement said, as reported by CNBC.
People briefed on the internal guidance told reporters it had already gone out to FBI offices nationwide. The Herald has not independently reviewed the notice, and the two accounts remain unreconciled.
The Minneapolis case behind the dispute
The reported shift follows a contested episode in Minnesota. Renée Good, a 37-year-old American woman, was shot and killed in Minneapolis on January 7 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross during a federal enforcement operation.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office for Minnesota briefly opened a use-of-force inquiry, which was then halted. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Richard Durbin have asked the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility to examine that decision, which they attribute to FBI Director Kash Patel and other senior officials. More than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned in protest, and the FBI agent who initially investigated the shooting also resigned.
The department's position is that the case did not warrant a civil rights investigation. The Justice Department has said there was "no basis" for one.
Why this lands hard in Los Angeles
Southern California has been among the most heavily worked areas of the immigration enforcement campaign, and among the most contested. Local police departments here generally do not investigate federal agents, a limit that predates the current administration and reflects longstanding jurisdictional practice rather than any local choice.
That is the practical significance of the reported change for Angelenos. If the FBI steps back and local departments have no authority to step in, the remaining scrutiny of a federal officer who fires a weapon in Los Angeles would come substantially from within the officer's own department.
Whether that is what has actually happened is, for now, a matter of dispute between the reporting and the agencies.
