Nearly six months have passed since federal officers shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis. No one has been arrested, the Trump administration has provided no reason to believe that any serious investigation is taking place, and federal officials continue to stonewall state and local investigators in Minnesota.This inaction was predictable. The day after Good’s death, Vice President Vance insisted at a press conference that the agent who shot her would face no criminal charges. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vance told reporters. “He was doing his job.” Soon, Stephen Miller doubled down on the message, announcing “to all ICE officers” that “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” Federal agents apparently received the message: The next day, an ICE agent fired a gun into a Minneapolis home, wounding a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. The week after that, Pretti was killed outside a doughnut shop. The Department of Homeland Security called him a “domestic terrorist” and said that the officers who shot him had acted in self-defense.Typically, after a contentious killing by a law-enforcement officer, the Justice Department would launch a criminal civil-rights probe. Following George Floyd’s murder, for example, DOJ conducted an investigation alongside Minnesota law enforcement, and both federal and state prosecutors brought separate charges against the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. So far, though, the federal government has succeeded in protecting immigration officers from serious consequences for the violence of what DHS termed “Operation Metro Surge.” But in promising a total shield from accountability, Miller and Vance may have been premature. Law-enforcement officials in Minnesota are—albeit haltingly—beginning to move forward with investigations and prosecutions on their own. Their efforts may become the locus of yet another clash between state and federal authority in the age of President Trump.For the first few hours after the ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Good inside her car, the mechanisms of accountability appeared to operate normally: The FBI began mobilizing to investigate the crime scene alongside the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the state’s investigative agency. By the evening of the day she was killed, however, officials in Washington, D.C., had frozen out both Minnesota police and law enforcement in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located. In a recent podcast interview, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty recalled joining a conference call after Good’s death with the FBI, federal prosecutors, and Minnesota investigators: “Everybody agreed this would once again be a joint investigation. And then suddenly the BCA was kicked off the case.” Minnesota abruptly found itself without access to any of the evidence collected at the scene. Even Good’s maroon Honda Pilot, the windshield pierced by Ross’s bullet, was bundled away by the FBI into a storage facility before state law enforcement could get a look at it.DOJ was now the only agency able to conduct a full investigation into the shooting. But it had little apparent interest in doing so. According to The New York Times, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, refused to open a criminal investigation into Ross. Instead, DOJ looked into the possibility of investigating Good, along with her widow, Becca Good. Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in protest, as did an FBI agent in Minneapolis.[Quinta Jurecic: Harmeet Dhillon is not wasting any time]A similar pattern took place after Sosa-Celis was shot by the ICE agent Christian Castro. Minnesota investigators arrived at the house where Sosa-Celis lived and began collecting evidence alongside the FBI, only to be abruptly cut off when the bureau changed its mind. Then, instead of investigating Castro’s actions, federal prosecutors filed charges against Sosa-Celis and one of his housemates. Weeks later, they would go on to dismiss the case after discovering that Castro appeared to have lied when claiming that Sosa-Celis attacked him with a shovel.When Pretti was killed one week later by masked immigration officers, federal officials simply blocked state law enforcement from accessing the scene to begin with. State and local officials were left without the most basic information on Pretti’s death—including, to this day, any confirmation by the federal government about the identities of the people who shot him. This left the investigations into all three shootings moribund. State and local law enforcement, prevented from reviewing evidence, couldn’t move forward on their own. The federal government, meanwhile, seemed interested mostly in shielding immigration officials from any kind of serious accountability.Under pressure, administration officials made some gestures toward examining the shootings. The Department of Homeland Security opened internal investigations into Good’s and Pretti’s killings, and an agency spokesperson told me that both remain ongoing. A week after Pretti’s death, DOJ announced a criminal civil-rights investigation into the incident, the same step the department had refused after Good’s killing. DHS has walked back its early defiant tone on the Pretti case: When I asked the agency about Pretti, the spokesperson stated only that the FBI’s investigation remains ongoing. As for the Sosa-Celis case, the Justice Department is also conducting a criminal investigation into Castro and the ICE agent with him on the scene. DHS told me that the agency has placed both men on administrative leave and that the two may eventually be fired or criminally charged, but it did not address their conduct around the shooting.But the administration has provided little reason to trust that this work will be carried out in good faith. In the same email in which DHS confirmed that it is still investigating Good’s death, the agency said that Ross had “acted in self-defense” after Good had “weaponized her vehicle against him”—a word choice not particularly indicative of an agency keeping an open mind as to what happened. Speaking with CBS, a senior DOJ official minimized the Pretti investigation as a “look under the hood” rather than a full-fledged criminal probe. The outlet also reported that the lawyers assigned to the Pretti investigation were new hires at the Civil Rights Division without expertise in the complicated work of scrutinizing law-enforcement abuses. (One of the prosecutors on the case, Robert Keenan, previously made headlines when he asked a judge to sentence a former Louisville police officer to a single day in prison in the Breonna Taylor case.) The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility—the internal watchdog typically responsible for investigating agents’ misconduct—recently began handing out threatening letters to people who expressed anger online after the killings of Good and Pretti. And in the Sosa-Celis case, DOJ has described its investigation as focusing only on whether the agents lied about Castro’s interaction with Sosa-Celis. I reached out to both the Justice Department’s D.C. headquarters and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, which is conducting the probe, to ask whether they are also looking into the shooting of Sosa-Celis; neither responded.With no real movement from the federal government, state and local law enforcement—along with private litigants—have begun pushing for access to evidence. This spring, authorities from the Minnesota state government and Hennepin County filed a lawsuit demanding that federal officials hand over the materials currently shielded by DHS and DOJ. Becca Good also filed her own suit requesting the return of the couple’s car, so that the vehicle can be examined by both the family’s lawyers and Minnesota investigators. The Good family’s legal team “continues to take all aggressive offensive measures and is fiercely committed to pursuing truth and accountability,” Antonio Romanucci, a lawyer hired by the family, said in an emailed statement.These lawsuits are still in their early stages. But recently, in a separate case, a judge ordered the federal government to hand over materials related to Good’s death. Months before the immigration surge in Minnesota, Jonathan Ross was involved in an altercation with a Central American man, Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, who was later convicted of assaulting Ross. After Good’s death, Muñoz-Guatemala’s defense attorneys moved for the judge in his case to provide them access to records about Ross and his actions around Good’s shooting. In early April, the judge agreed to allow Muñoz-Guatemala’s lawyers to see that material—which could eventually become available to the public, and therefore to investigators outside the federal government.Minnesota law enforcement is currently in the process of examining publicly available evidence in both the Good and Pretti cases, including the many videos of both shootings taken by onlookers. “The BCA is being very meticulous and looking at absolutely all the video,” Moriarty told me in an interview. “And we would expect to have their investigations here relatively soon”—perhaps within the next few weeks. At that point, Hennepin County prosecutors will evaluate whether they can prove that crimes were committed, even without evidence from the federal government. If so, they could file criminal charges against Ross and the Customs and Border Protection officers who shot Pretti. But Moriarty emphasized that her office has yet to reach a decision as to whether any of the officers broke state law.Hennepin County went through a similar process in the Sosa-Celis case. In May, prosecutors in Moriarty’s office filed criminal charges against Castro in state court for assault and falsely claiming that Sosa-Celis had attacked him. “We would like to have all the information the federal government has” about the shooting, Moriarty told me. “But because the BCA was at the scene and able to collect some of the evidence, we felt we had enough to go on.”The charges against Castro are the second state-level prosecution of a federal official to come out of Trump’s immigration surges. (Earlier this past spring, Moriarty’s office also filed charges against another ICE agent over a road-rage incident during Operation Metro Surge.) For that reason, it is also a direct test of Vance and Miller’s insistence that federal immigration officers are shielded by total immunity from state prosecutions. That claim, it turns out, is not actually true. “States do have this long history of prosecuting federal officials” for breaking state law, Bryna Godar, a staff attorney for the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me. She pointed to the Ruby Ridge standoff of 1992, after which Idaho state prosecutors filed manslaughter charges against an FBI agent.The Ruby Ridge case took a decade to litigate and ended unceremoniously when a new county prosecutor dropped the charges. As that experience suggests, the road to any state convictions in Minnesota may be long and rocky. Castro was arrested in Texas and is currently in state jail, waiting for Governor Greg Abbott to approve Minnesota’s formal request to send him back for prosecution. Once he arrives in Minnesota, Castro may move to have his case heard in federal rather than state court, as the road-rage defendant has already done. The legal and practical components of this process are so confusing that the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office released a YouTube video attempting to explain the potential twists and turns to the public. At one point in the video, an earnest attorney in a dark suit and tie says to viewers, “If the agent were convicted in federal court, there would be no pardon by the president, because the conviction would be under state law.” (“People do ask us that frequently,” Moriarty told me.)[Quinta Jurecic: The ‘presumption of regularity’ is evaporating]Wherever such cases end up, prosecutors will have to convince a judge that the defendant is not shielded from state charges by the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which provides federal officials with limited immunity for actions taken within the scope of their duties. Only then—possibly after years of appeals, even to the Supreme Court—can such a case go to trial. Any state prosecution of those responsible for Good’s and Pretti’s deaths would involve a similarly extended timeline. By then, another president may have taken office, potentially one friendlier to the idea of collaborating with local officials in grappling with past government abuses. But even with federal cooperation—or alongside a newly filed federal case—state prosecutors would still have to establish any criminal culpability in court, where the law-enforcement officers would have the chance to defend themselves.Six months may seem like a long time to elapse without a decision as to whether to pursue charges. But given the potential timeline ahead, it is also just a short interval. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office has continued to solicit evidence of federal abuses from the public, and Moriarty told me that her team is “probably investigating over 30 cases.” She has spoken with other local attorneys from around the country to prepare them for how to preserve evidence if Trump launches an immigration surge in their area. Outside Hennepin County, other prosecutors are investigating other incidents as well: Mark Haase, a senior assistant attorney in next-door Ramsey County, told me that law enforcement there is currently pursuing three potential criminal cases regarding ICE and CBP abuses in St. Paul. In Illinois, state police are conducting an initial criminal probe of the death of Silverio Villegas González, a Mexican immigrant killed in an ICE shooting during the immigration surge in Chicago. Meanwhile, private litigants such as Becca Good will also be pushing for accountability in civil court—a process that will involve its own battles over the legal possibilities for seeking justice against federal officials.Trump appears to see the United States as a quasi-monarchy in which he—and, through him, the federal government—is the only actor who matters. By carrying out immigration raids in places such as the Twin Cities, he sought to impose his will through unilateral force. But even in the midst of those surges, the visible dissent of people such as Renee Good and Alex Pretti punctured that fantasy. Now the push for justice in the face of federal indifference represents another challenge to the president’s vision. These efforts will take a long time, perhaps outlasting the rest of this presidency, but even that is a reminder that Trump does not always get to have the final word.