Editorial: Can we trust the indictment against anti-ICE protesters?

Trust me. Trust the process.

That was the essential message U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen delivered Tuesday, June 16, at a Minneapolis press conference announcing a sweeping conspiracy indictment against 15 Minnesotans connected to anti-ICE protest activity. Ninety-four pages. Eight counts. Five months of Signal chats and social media posts assembled into what Rosen called a case against "organized, lawless behavior."

But Rosen's office has a dubious track record with precisely this kind of prosecution. In the months after Operation Metro Surge launched last December, federal prosecutors charged three dozen Minnesotans in a first wave of cases allegedly involving assaulting or impeding federal immigration agents. Many of them have since been dismissed or downgraded.

Rosen is apparently unbothered by this reality. "I don't think any cases have failed in any way ... You watch how the evidence plays out," he said at Tuesday's press conference.

That response deserves strict scrutiny. Not because the people named in the indictment are necessarily innocent. A grand jury found probable cause, and the indictment appears to document genuinely confrontational organizing activity, including blockades, vehicle deployments, and the following of federal agents to their homes.

The allegations must be taken seriously. But notably, Rosen acknowledges that no federal agents suffered bodily harm as a result. That context matters when evaluating the 94-page charging document's claims of organized violence.

So does this: The people named in this indictment should not be conflated with the thousands of Minnesotans whose response to Operation Metro Surge was recently honored with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award. The crowd-sourced documentation of federal vehicles, building of rapid-response networks and alerting neighbors to agents' presence are among the acts cited by the conveners of the award as examples of civic courage.

Prosecuting those who genuinely broke the law is appropriate. Using that prosecution to cast a chill over those who did not is an entirely different matter. In Minnesota right now, the line between the two bears continuous scrutiny.

The JFK award's distinctly different interpretation of what happened in Minnesota this winter, combined with the pattern of conduct by Rosen's office over the past six months, makes placing trust in his office a much harder sell than he appears to recognize. Viewed together, they reveal something essential about Rosen's prosecutorial priorities: enormous energy directed at protesters, with results that have often failed to hold up in court.

A Star Tribune analysis has found that roughly a third of those first-wave cases have been dismissed for reasons including evidence contradicting law enforcement's claims or a lack of probable cause. Many others have been downgraded from felonies to misdemeanors.

Magistrate Judge David Schultz has called one of those previous charging documents "perplexing" and, at an April hearing, said it was based on a " false affidavit." That's an unsettling judicial rebuke.

Rosen was asked about the false affidavit on Tuesday and had nothing to say other than assurances about watching the evidence play out. But the rebuke, in combination with the dropped and downgraded charges, raises the question of whether the goal is law and order or putting a chill on dissent.

Then there is the case of Julio Sosa-Celis. When an ICE agent shot Sosa-Celis on Jan. 14, Rosen's office moved swiftly: Within days it charged the Venezuelan man with felony assault on a federal officer, based largely on the agent's account that he'd been attacked with a snow shovel and broom before he fired his weapon. Kristi Noem, then Homeland Security secretary, called it "an attempted murder of federal law enforcement."

Video evidence told a different story. So did eyewitnesses. Rosen's office eventually filed a motion to dismiss, acknowledging that newly discovered evidence was "materially inconsistent" with the government's allegations. Rosen's office did not name the officer whose account fell apart. It did not explain in its dismissal motion what, specifically, had been false.

Minnesota has commendably stepped in. In May, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged ICE agent Christian Castro in connection with the Sosa-Celis shooting.

Asked this week by an editorial writer whether his office intends to bring federal charges against Castro, Rosen did not respond. Nor did he respond to other questions.

That is one face of federal prosecutorial priority in Minnesota. Here is another: the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in January. Pretti was fatally shot during an encounter with federal agents the same month. At Tuesday's press conference, a reporter asked Rosen directly why no charges had been filed against the officers involved in those deaths. His answer: The investigations are "ongoing" and will proceed "at the proper pace and at the proper time."

The same five months that produced indictments against 15 protesters has produced no federal charges or public findings in the deaths of two Minnesotans shot by federal agents. Prosecutorial priorities are a choice.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch, an independent international human rights organization, held a public briefing in Minneapolis. It dubbed Operation Metro Surge a "manufactured crisis," one that led ordinary citizens to fight back to defend their communities.

One of the speakers took an apparent jab at Rosen. "Prosecutorial aggression is not a substitute for prosecutorial competence," said Jonah Giese of the National Lawyers Guild Minnesota.

The troubling Minnesota prosecutorial priorities and pattern have a national echo. In the Chicago suburb of Broadview, six protesters were charged with felony conspiracy last fall in connection with anti-ICE demonstrations. The case collapsed in May after alarming allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Rosen said Tuesday that his office distinguishes between lawful protest and criminal conduct, the correct standard. The indictment, among other things, quotes the enraged social media videos of Kyle Wagner, a leader of Direct Action Minnesota, recorded in late January, as overt acts in a criminal conspiracy.

Wagner recorded his videos soon after Alex Pretti's death and he should be held accountable. But it's not unreasonable to expect the same urgency and thoroughness from federal officials when it comes to accountability for the agents involved in the deaths of Good and Pretti. The same goes for evaluating the actions of the agent who falsified the circumstances of the Sosa-Celis shooting.

A justice system that moves at a swift pace for protesters and another for the agents who killed two Minnesotans is not blind justice. It is selective justice.

Minnesotans should be clear-eyed about the difference, especially when Rosen asks them to trust him and the process.

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