Mass exodus hits Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division amid lack of action in Minneapolis, sources say

Several career prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced they were leaving the department, shortly after learning there would be no civil rights investigation in the fatal shooting of Minneapolis woman by a federal immigration agent, according to six sources briefed on the matter.

At least six prosecutors, most of whom are supervisors in the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section, will leave their posts. Their decision to leave was announced Monday during a staff meeting, the sources told CBS News.

The announcement came after CBS News reported Friday that the section’s career prosecutors had offered to drop all their work to help investigate the Minneapolis shooting, but were told there would be no civil rights criminal investigation. The ICE officer who shot and killed Good was identified as Jonathan Rosswho a DHS source told CBS News last week was once dragged by a car while trying to arrest a man in Bloomington, Minnesota, six months ago.

Although the Justice Department considered treating the investigation as a civil rights investigation “under color of law” into 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, unlike Good, is considered the victim of a crime, the sources added.

CBS could not immediately determine who made the decision.

At least six career prosecutors in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office also resigned of their jobs, CBS also reported Tuesday.

Their resignations come as the office faces pressure from the department’s top leadership to treat the investigation as an assault on a federal agent, rather than a civil rights investigation.

“There is currently no basis for a civil rights criminal investigation,” Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche told CBS in a statement.

A Justice Department official confirmed to CBS that leaders of the Civil Rights Division’s criminal section announced their departures as part of an early retirement program and said they were seeking to participate “well in advance of the events in Minnesota.”

“Any suggestion to the contrary is false,” the official added.

Multiple sources told CBS that although most people leaving the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division
choose the early retirement option, the schedule of events in Minneapolis factored into their decision to make the announcement this week.

Video footage shows the officer, identified in court records from the previous incident while Ross, fired three shots at the car as Good began to drive away.

The video also appears to show that officers failed to take immediate action to ensure Good received emergency medical treatment after the shooting. Separate video from the scene showed officers stopping a man who claimed to be a doctor from walking toward Good.

Top Trump administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have publicly sought to shift blame to Good, alleging she was trying to attack Ross with her car.

But some legal experts say the video evidence shows the car had its back turned toward Ross and that’s enough to warrant a civil rights investigation into the matter.

“Just looking at the body of evidence that I see, which is limited, there is enough to conduct a criminal investigation to determine whether Ms. Good’s rights were deprived under color of law,” Julius Nam, a former federal civil rights prosecutor in Los Angeles, said in a CBS interview last week.

The Civil Rights Division has already faced a mass exodus from its ranks since last year, after political leaders dramatically altered its historic mission of protecting the nation’s most vulnerable populations.

Until now, the criminal section had lost fewer lawyers than the division’s other sections, which collectively lost about 75% of their staff in 2025.

The departures, including that of the section’s chief, were driven not only by Minneapolis, but also by frustrations with how the division’s political leadership handled other cases and sidelined prosecutors, two of the sources said.

Last year, for example, the division’s political leaders stepped in pending the sentencing of a former Louisville police officer 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 just one day in jail.

The judge ultimately sentenced him to 33 months in prison.

Then, in November, the division abruptly filed a motion to dismiss a case that was about to go to trial against two officials from a local sheriff’s office in the Middle District of Tennessee who were facing charges for using excessive force and attempting to cover up their alleged misconduct.

Section leaders were recently offered the opportunity to take early retirement and several of them decided to take it, several sources said. The lack of an investigation in Minneapolis was a breaking point for some of them and contributed to their decision to announce it at a staff meeting, several sources added.

The Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division is responsible for prosecuting hate crimes, as well as cases against law enforcement such as excessive use of force, sexual misconduct, false arrests, or willful indifference to serious medical needs.

In a statement, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said that if such high-profile incidents as the Minneapolis shootings “are not the subject of full, impartial investigations that truly seek accountability, we must wonder how many more cases go unreported, undocumented, or deliberately covered up by an administration that no longer attempts to hide its intent to intimidate and silence all those who do not comply with its agenda.”

Although U.S. attorney’s offices can also conduct their own investigations into excessive force by a law enforcement officer, the Minneapolis incident would likely be considered a case of national significance under Justice Department guidelines because it resulted in death.

In cases of national significance, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division is supposed to coordinate with the local U.S. attorney’s office, the Justice Manual says.

One of the section’s highest-profile civil rights lawsuits in recent years took place in Minneapolis, after a former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020.

Chauvin pleaded guilty for 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 2021 case.