Several career prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced their resignations this week shortly after they learned there would be no civil rights probe into the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by a federal immigration agent, according to five sources briefed on the matter.
At least six prosecutors, most of whom are supervisors in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section, will be leaving their jobs. Their decision to resign was announced in a meeting to staff on Monday, the sources told CBS News.
The announcement came after CBS News reported on Friday that career prosecutors in the section had offered to drop all of their work to help investigate the Minneapolis shooting, but they were told there would be no criminal civil rights investigation. The ICE officer who shot and killed Good has been identified as Jonathan Ross, who a DHS source told CBS News last week was previously dragged by a car when trying to arrest a man in Bloomington, Minnesota, six months ago.
Although the Justice Department contemplated treating the investigation as a “color of law” civil rights investigation into the excessive use of force, it later changed course, two different sources briefed on the matter told CBS.
Now, the investigation is being treated as an assault on a federal officer, in which Ross, as opposed to Good, is seen as the victim of a crime, the sources added.
CBS could not immediately determine who made that decision.
A Justice Department official confirmed to CBS that leadership in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section gave notice they were going to depart under an early retirement program, and said they sought to participate “well before the events in Minnesota.”
“Any suggestion to the contrary is false,” the official added.
Several sources told CBS that while most of those resigning are taking the early retirement option, the timing of the events in Minneapolis factored into their decision to make the announcement this week.
Video footage shows Ross fired three rounds at the car as Good started to drive away. The video also appeared to indicate the officers did not take immediate steps to ensure that Good received emergency medical care after the shooting took place. A separate video from the scene showed officers stopping a man who claimed to be a doctor from moving toward Good.
Senior officials in the Trump administration, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have publicly sought to cast blame on Good, alleging she was trying to assault Ross with her car.
But some legal experts say the video evidence shows that the car was turning away from Ross and that is sufficient to justify investigating the case as a civil rights one.
“Just looking at the totality of the evidence that I see, which is limited, there is enough there to make a criminal inquiry to determine whether there was deprivation of Ms. Good’s rights under color of law,” Julius Nam, a former federal civil rights prosecutor in Los Angeles, told CBS in an interview last week.
The Civil Rights Division has already faced a mass exodus in its ranks since last year, after political leadership drastically altered its mission of historically protecting the country’s most vulnerable populations.
Until now, the criminal section had lost fewer attorneys compared with the division’s other sections, which collectively lost approximately 75% of their staff in 2025.
The resignations, which include that of the section’s chief, were not solely driven by Minneapolis, but also by frustrations at how political leaders in the division were handling other cases and sidelining prosecutors, two of the sources said.
Last year, for example, political leadership in the division intervened in a pending sentencing of a former Louisville police officer who was convicted of violating Breonna Taylor’s civil rights and assigned a new prosecutor to the case who then asked a federal judge to sentence him to serve just one day in prison.
The judge ultimately sentenced him to serve 33 months.
Then in November, the division abruptly filed a motion to dismiss a case that was just about to go to trial against two officials in a local sheriff’s office in the Middle District of Tennessee who were facing charges for using excessive force and trying to hide their alleged misconduct.
Officials in the section were recently offered a chance to retire early, and several of them decided to take it, several of the sources said. The lack of an investigation in Minneapolis was a breaking point for some of them and helped factor into their decision to announce it in a staff meeting, several of the sources added.
The Civil Rights Division’s criminal section is responsible for prosecuting hate crimes, as well as cases against law enforcement such as excessive use of force, sexual misconduct, making false arrests or showing deliberate indifference to serious medical needs.
Although U.S. Attorney’s offices can also conduct their own investigations into excessive force by a law enforcement officer, the incident in Minneapolis would likely be deemed to be a case of national significance under Justice Department guidelines because it resulted in death.
In cases of national significance, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division is supposed to coordinate with the local U.S. Attorney’s office, the Justice Manual says.
One of the most high-profile civil rights prosecutions by the section in recent years took place in Minneapolis, after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020.
Chauvin pleaded guilty to willfully depriving, while acting under color of law, Floyd’s constitutional rights, as well as the rights of a 14-year-old boy in an unrelated case from 2021.
