Mass exodus as Trump DOJ demands activists face dubious charges: 'Down to a skeleton crew'

The Trump administration has pressured Minnesota federal prosecutors to pursue dubious charges against ICE activists, prompting a large number to leave or prepare their departures.

A new Mother Jones report on Friday described the unprecedented situation mounting as the administration pushes "allegations of protesters assaulting Homeland Security agents."

As the Justice Department announced Friday it had arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon and three others for covering a protest inside a St. Paul church, "the office’s attorneys are also being asked to focus on cases that accuse activist groups of conspiring to impede the work of immigration agents," Mother Jones reported.

"The administration is pressuring them to file charges even when agents have not turned over body-cam footage to support the charges, and when information exists to suggest the officer may have assaulted the protester first, according to the sources, who declined to be named for fear of retribution," Mother Jones reported.

It's a sharp difference from how prosecutors typically operate.

“That’s historically not how we do things,” one told me. Traditionally, “you see the evidence first and then decide what to charge; you don’t charge and then see the evidence. It’s a horrible way of doing business.”

In the wake of ICE's fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good, five senior prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., a unit that specifically investigates police killings, have resigned.

“It’s a big deal, and this is fairly unprecedented,” former federal prosecutor Laurie Levenson, who is now based in Los Angeles, told Mother Jones. “You have so many leaving, and frankly on principle: We are living in unique times where prosecutors are being asked to do things they’ve never had to do before. That’s not what they signed up for.”

Some prosecutors had left the Minnesota US Attorney’s Office towards the end of the Biden administration.

"But since Trump got reelected, more than 50 out of about 135 staffers have left. The office had fewer than 30 prosecutors prior to the latest wave of resignations, less than half of the proper head count, according to Anders Folk, a former acting US attorney in Minnesota, who left in 2021," according to Mother Jones.

“We are down to a skeleton crew,” a source told the outlet.