PORTLAND, Ore. — Keith Ellison held up his cellphone. The Minnesota attorney general was onstage in an Oregon theater in front of hundreds of people, accompanied by four of his Democratic peers from other states, to mark a year of coordinated legal strategy to resist the Trump administration’s expansive use of executive power.
“Can I just note, real quickly, that we need everybody to use these things?” Ellison said to the audience, which earlier had greeted the out-of-state attorney general with a standing ovation. “They have been remarkably helpful.”
Ellison and his fellow Democratic attorneys general were sitting onstage last week at Revolution Hall, a music venue most evenings. Over the past year, AGs have emerged as unlikely rock stars of legal resistance to President Donald Trump, who has made broad use of presidential authority on immigration enforcement and a wide range of other issues, unchecked by the majority-Republican Congress.
Cellphone video has emerged as a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s version of events, at a time when the federal government has restricted state and local investigators from accessing potential evidence to pursue their own investigations into excessive force and fatal shootings by immigration agents in their jurisdictions.
On Saturday, witnesses with cellphone cameras recorded federal agents in Minneapolis shooting and killing Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who, like many in the city, was recording how U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents interact with the public during enforcement activity. The video evidence of Pretti’s killing was captured by coordinated but loosely organized bands of ordinary citizens using their cellphones.
The images, shared widely on social media, directly contradict official accounts, including claims by U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who accused Pretti of attacking agents. Bystander video shows Pretti filming with his cellphone before multiple agents tackled him to the ground, beat him, and then shot him to death after taking his gun. Pretti, who was licensed to carry a gun in public in Minnesota, never drew his weapon.
Two weeks earlier in Minneapolis, cellphone cameras captured from multiple angles the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by an immigration agent. A week after that in nearby St. Paul, Minnesota, cellphone video showed armed immigration agents forcing ChongLy Scott Thao, a middle-aged naturalized U.S. citizen, from his home and into subfreezing temperatures while he was wearing only underwear and sandals.
There are “a whole lot more stories,” Ellison said, many caught on mobile phones or dashboard cameras, and all demonstrating the forceful tactics being used by some of the more than 3,000 federal immigration agents in his state. One image Ellison didn’t mention: the photo of a 5-year-old from Ecuador in federal custody, wearing a blue bunny hat and his Spider-Man backpack.
In Minnesota, the state has set up an online tip portal to capture citizen-generated evidence of federal misconduct or unlawful behavior, including cellphone images, after the U.S. Department of Justice refused to share evidence in Good’s death with county prosecutors and Ellison’s office. Similar evidence-gathering portals or federal accountability commissions are in place in Colorado, Illinois and Oregon.
When ordinary people capture aggressive federal tactics on video, Ellison said, they’re also helping make a case in federal court that the mass federal deployment of immigration agents to their states is unconstitutional and violates state sovereignty. Minnesota has sued to end ICE’s aggressive enforcement action in the state, officially known as Operation Metro Surge.
Such evidence could also be critical if the federal government continues to resist investigating or pursuing federal criminal charges against the unidentified agents who killed Pretti, as well as Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good. In a separate case, a federal judge issued an order after Pretti’s death blocking the Trump administration from destroying or altering evidence related to the shooting.
Constitutional limits make it difficult, although not impossible, for states to prosecute federal officers for violations of state law, said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. But there are some successful cases in which states have pursued officers who are alleged to have gone beyond the scope of their federal duties or have acted unreasonably in carrying out those duties, she said.
Such cases arise most frequently during periods of considerable friction between states and the federal government, Godar said, including disputes over enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, Prohibition, and integration and desegregation policies. Another such test of federalism and state sovereignty may be upon us, she said.
“It seems like we’re potentially entering another period or in another period of increased friction between the states and the federal government in a way that could lead to these cases again,” Godar said.
Ellison said that state and county investigators were proceeding carefully and deliberately with their own investigation.
“It’s true that the feds are denying us access to the investigative file,” Ellison said. “It’s also true that there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”
Noem has repeatedly insisted that ICE agents and other officers are the actual victims of the increased violence. She also has argued that protests and scrutiny of their enforcement tactics has not only interfered with their operations, but also has provoked the aggressive federal response.