FBI to ICE Agents: Investigate Your Own Murders of Migrants

Internal guidance moves a key investigative function from an outside agency to ICE's own Homeland Security Investigations unit, even as DOJ and DHS publicly deny anything has changed.

WASHINGTON — Twenty-two people died in ICE custody last year. At least 30 have been shot by immigration agents since President Trump took office. And now, according to internal FBI guidance, the one federal agency positioned to independently examine those encounters is stepping back.

FBI field offices nationwide were told in writing that the bureau will no longer take the lead on “assault on a federal officer” cases involving ICE and other Department of Homeland Security agents. Those cases — the routine paperwork that follows any claim an officer was attacked — have long doubled as the FBI’s primary window into ICE shootings, since they generate the witness statements, video evidence and forensic work that can later support a civil rights case against an agent who used deadly force.

Under the new guidance, that work moves instead to Homeland Security Investigations — ICE’s own investigative arm, operating inside the same department as the agents whose conduct would be under review.

DOJ and DHS say nothing has changed. In a joint statement, the two departments insisted the relationship between them “has not changed,” and that the FBI “will continue to investigate in accordance with agency policy.” But legal observers note that field-level instructions don’t need a press release to reshape what actually happens on the ground — and if FBI agents simply stop opening these cases, the effect is the same as a formal policy change, whether DOJ calls it one or not.

What the FBI is walking away from

Under longstanding Justice Department guidance, the FBI is supposed to be the exclusive investigator of assaults on, and murders of, federal officers — with narrow exceptions. That has made the bureau the default outside check whenever an ICE agent claims to have been attacked, including in cases where the agent then opened fire.

Handing those cases to HSI keeps the investigation inside DHS. And HSI’s mandate is narrower than the FBI’s in a critical way: it has no authority to investigate federal civil rights violations under 18 U.S.C. § 242, the statute used to charge officers who unlawfully kill or abuse people while on duty. Reporting also indicates HSI lacks the FBI’s forensic capacity — ballistics, scene reconstruction, the infrastructure that turns a shooting into a prosecutable case.

The pattern this fits

This is not the first sign of the walls closing in. In Minneapolis in January, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension expected to run a joint investigation with the FBI — until federal officials cut the state out entirely, leaving the FBI in sole control and state investigators locked out of the evidence. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison warned publicly that an investigation conducted entirely behind federal doors would struggle to earn the public’s trust.

Weeks ago, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by ICE agents after a traffic stop in Houston. Days after that, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero died during an ICE stop in Biddeford, Maine. Both deaths triggered protests and renewed demands that ICE leave local communities altogether.

What disappears when the FBI steps back

The FBI’s assault-on-officer investigations, whatever their stated purpose, have functioned as the closest thing to independent scrutiny that ICE shootings receive. Move that function to HSI, and DHS is effectively investigating itself — with the unit doing the investigating unable to bring the civil rights charges that would hold an agent accountable in the first place.

For families of the people ICE has shot and killed, the accountability fight now shifts further away from federal criminal courts and toward civil litigation, inspector general reviews and whatever documentation advocates and journalists can gather on their own. The FBI isn’t just declining to prosecute. It’s declining to look.

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This is the story ICE doesn't want tracked — the paper trail that decides whether a shooting gets investigated at all just got thinner, and almost no one noticed. Migrant Insider is going to keep noticing. Become a paid subscriber and help us chase down what DOJ won't say on the record — and send this to one person who needs to know oversight just quietly disappeared.