Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota and multiple senior Civil Rights Division lawyers at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. have resigned in the last 48 hours after the Trump administration refused to investigate the killing of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Among those who have resigned are Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson, appointed by President Donald Trump last June, along with Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, Thomas Calhoun-Lopez, Ruth Schneider and Tom Hollenhurst.

In D.C., at least six senior prosecutors in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have also indicated they are resigning after the head of the division, Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon, informed staff that the division would not investigate the actions of Ross.

The Civil Rights Division normally investigates every fatal shooting by a federal officer to review whether civil rights violations occurred, even if the inquiry later concludes that no charge is warranted. In this case, however, the division was excluded from the Minneapolis shooting probe entirely, a decision that prompted an extraordinary exodus of career prosecutors.

In a statement Tuesday, Trump’s personal lawyer-turned Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said there was “currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the killing of Good.

The murder of Good and ongoing federal occupation of Minneapolis-St. Paul have provoked mass protests across the United States. Demonstrations erupted last week after video evidence, viewed by millions of people, showed ICE agent Ross positioning himself in front of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle before firing his pistol first through the bottom far-right corner of the windshield and then twice through the open side window, killing the unarmed mother of three.

After murdering Good, Ross called her a “f__king bitch” and quickly left the scene. His fellow ICE thugs prevented a self-identified physician from rendering any medical aid to Good after she was shot. Emergency medical technicians were not able to drive directly to the scene of the shooting and were forced to walk on foot, further delaying medical care.

In the aftermath of the ICE murder, top Trump administration officials quickly labeled Good a “domestic terrorist” and backed Ross’s killing of her, justifying it as “self-defense.” Even as more video evidence emerged confirming that Good did not try to hit Ross, or any other agent, with her vehicle, Vice President JD Vance doubled down in his attacks on the dead mother, calling her a “deranged leftist” who was engaged in “classic terrorism.”

After the killing of Good, federal officials quickly moved to stifle any local investigation into Ross. Rather than investigate Ross and other ICE agents for their role in the murder, the Trump administration and the FBI are pursuing an investigation into Good’s widow and any alleged political or organizational ties of the couple, turning the killing into a spearhead for criminalizing dissent and expanding state repression.

The New York Times reported on January 12 that federal investigators are “looking into [Good’s] possible connections to activist groups protesting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.”

The Trump administration’s refusal to investigate the killing of Good is not an isolated distortion of justice, but part of a broader political-legal offensive rooted in National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) issued in September and the December 4 memorandum from US Attorney General Pam Bondi that followed. NSPM-7 creates a “domestic terrorism” framework that strings together unrelated acts of protest, opposition to immigration enforcement and left-wing political expression into a single alleged conspiracy of “organized political violence,” recasting anti-capitalist, pro-immigrant, anti-fascist and socialist sentiments as indicators of terror to be hunted down by the federal state.

The Bondi memo, issued in December to implement NSPM-7, explicitly tasks the FBI and Department of Justice with compiling lists of groups and individuals deemed to be engaged in “domestic terrorism,” disseminating intelligence on “Antifa and Antifa-aligned” networks, and mobilizing joint terrorism task forces to investigate and disrupt these political formations.

Far from being limited to violent crime, these directives criminalize political dissent and protest under the rubric of terrorism, effectively giving the state license to treat criticism of the government, pro-immigrant activism and socialist advocacy as security threats. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, NSPM-7 and the Bondi memo together constitute a fascistic blueprint for deploying the full federal police apparatus against the democratic rights of workers and immigrants, regardless of citizenship status.

Trump’s own Truth Social post on Tuesday leaves no doubt about the political character of the federal response. In a string of false and inflammatory claims, he told Minnesotans that the state suffered from “thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums,” and insisted that “all the patriots of ICE” were simply trying to remove these alleged threats from their communities.

He charged “professional agitators” with fomenting unrest and promised a “day of reckoning & retribution,” even though the only ones kidnapping workers and shooting mothers in the face for a paycheck are agents of the federal Gestapo.

Trump’s rant is a public declaration of policy. The language of “reckoning and retribution,” the demonization of immigrants and protesters as violent criminals mirror the framework established by NSPM-7 and the Bondi memo. What is being prepared is not a narrow policing operation, but the normalization of mass repression. The state is laying the ideological and legal groundwork to treat opposition to capitalism, deportations and authoritarian rule as a form of “domestic terrorism,” justifying surveillance, raids, prosecutions and violence against broad layers of the working class.

The fascistic character of these actions flows from a deeper crisis of American capitalism itself. The state is moving to repression not from a position of strength, but because its social foundations are collapsing.

Millions of workers and young people are rejecting the existing political order, with support for socialist ideas and opposition to ICE and mass deportations reaching historic levels. What is being prepared is the violent defense of a discredited system.

The Democratic Party offers no genuine opposition to this police-state agenda. Notwithstanding verbal denunciations from so-called “progressives” such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, the Democrats oppose calls to shut down ICE, end the pogrom against immigrants, release the tens of thousands imprisoned in ICE concentration camps and guarantee the rights of all workers, native-born and immigrant alike. The Democratic Party—like Trump and the Republicans a party of the corporate oligarchy and the capitalist state—fears the emergence of mass working class opposition from below far more than it does the consolidation of a presidential dictatorship.

The response cannot be appeals to the very institutions carrying out these crimes. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class and the building of rank-and-file organizations outside the control of the corporate parties and union bureaucracies to protect workers from the immigration Gestapo and begin preparations for a general strike to bring down the fascistic Trump regime.