Minnesota Sues Trump Administration Over ICE Killings — And a Car Sitting Shrink-Wrapped in a Warehouse
The state wants a federal judge to force DOJ and DHS to hand over evidence in the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—including a shrink-wrapped car sitting untouched in a Brooklyn Center warehouse.
WASHINGTON — Somewhere in a federal storage facility in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, sits a car.
It belongs to Renee Good, or rather it belonged to her — the 37-year-old prize-winning poet, hobby guitarist, wife and mother of three who was shot and killed behind the wheel of that car on a public Minneapolis street on the morning of January 7, by an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross.
The car is shrink-wrapped. It has never been examined. It has never been processed. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension obtained a judicial search warrant for it. They asked the FBI, repeatedly, to hand it over or let them execute the warrant. The FBI either refused or didn’t bother to respond.
That car — untouched, sealed in plastic, locked inside a building controlled by the federal government — is what this lawsuit is about.
Minnesota filed suit in federal court in Washington today, March 24, the same week Markwayne Mullin was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the Department of Homeland Security. The state is asking a federal judge to order the Trump administration to stop obstructing state investigators and hand over the evidence they need to determine whether the men who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti broke Minnesota law.
It is an extraordinary thing for a state to have to do. And the fact that Minnesota had to do it tells you everything.
Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Health Care system. He lived in Minneapolis. On the morning of January 24, federal immigration agents shot and killed him on a public street. Video widely circulated afterward suggested he was restrained by multiple officers when two masked agents shot him dead.
Hours after the shooting, President Trump logged onto Truth Social and posted a photograph of what he said was Pretti’s firearm — sitting on the seat of a car, surrounded by charging cords. Not in an evidence bag. Not in a crime lab. Surrounded by charging cords.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension arrived at the Pretti scene that morning to do what investigators do. A federal agent — serving as incident commander — told them he’d been ordered not to let them in. Even after they went to the Whipple Federal Building and waited for hours to conduct interviews, the HSI Assistant Special Agent in Charge eventually walked out and told the BCA: you’re not allowed to participate in any part of this investigation.
They still don’t have the names of the masked agents who shot him.
Three shootings in 17 days. Three times, federal agents initially signaled they’d cooperate with their state counterparts. Three times, within hours, the cooperation evaporated — not because of any case-specific investigative need, the lawsuit says, but because senior officials at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security intervened and said no.
It wasn’t a series of independent decisions. It was a policy.
The lawsuit, brought by Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, makes that case methodically. DOJ never responded to the formal document requests — called Touhy demands — that Minnesota submitted in February. Not a denial. Not an extension request. Nothing. The deadlines passed. DOJ said nothing.
DHS at least wrote back. Their response, dated March 3, argued that their own disclosure regulations don’t apply to requests from state law enforcement in criminal investigations. Minnesota’s lawyers called that argument legally meritless — and noted that DHS’s own regulations say precisely the opposite in plain language.
Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on that same day — March 3 — was asked about the department’s refusal to let state and local investigators participate in these probes. Her answer: “That is not my decision.”
She pointed to DOJ. DOJ pointed nowhere. The car stayed shrink-wrapped.
This is not how it used to work.
In November 2019, when a deputy U.S. Marshal shot a suspect at a St. Paul gas station, the BCA led the investigation and the feds cooperated. In June 2021, when two members of a U.S. Marshals task force killed a man in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood, same thing — BCA led, feds helped.
For decades, the complaint argues, federal and state investigators shared witnesses, shared evidence, shared the work that criminal accountability requires. It was, as the lawsuit puts it, “a core attribute of state sovereignty” — the right of Minnesota to investigate murders committed on Minnesota streets.
In January, that ended. Six prosecutors at the Justice Department resigned. An FBI agent resigned after being pressured to drop a civil rights inquiry into the agent who shot Renee Good — and redirect it toward investigating Good’s wife instead.
The Justice Department’s deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, went on television and said: “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate. And that is not the case here.”
Renee Good was a U.S. citizen. Alex Pretti was a VA nurse. And somewhere in Brooklyn Center, their evidence sits sealed in plastic, waiting for a federal judge to decide whether the rule of law still means anything in the state of Minnesota.
Minnesota is betting it does.
This reeks of cover-up. But I guess they know that as cover-up's the name of the game in Trump world. I guess we're lucky they even saved the car and didn't send it to a wrecking yard. The whole world saw an anonymous ICE agent remove Pretti's gun from the back of his waistband. It wasn't in his hand, he wasn't threatening anyone. These are cover-ups to murder, plain and simple. The State and the families have a right to justice.
I’m sure they know who the masked agents were that attacked Pretti. Murder has no statute of limitations.