There are some holes in the law on federal supremacy, and rising public sentiment for basic justice.Click to view this email in your browser. [link removed]

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JANUARY 29, 2026

On the

**Prospect** website [link removed]

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A Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured [link removed]

ICE doesn’t share its violent incidents with the public. So here’s our list. [link removed]

BY WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH [link removed]

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The Battle of Minneapolis Is Not Over [link removed]

ICE kidnappers are still on the rampage. [link removed]

BY RYAN COOPER [link removed]

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Democrats Determined to Squander Advantage on DHS Funding [link removed]

Democrats are succeeding in getting a showdown on new rules for immigration enforcement. But will those rules amount to anything? [link removed]

BY DAVID DAYEN [link removed]

****MEYERSON ON TAP****

**Can Trump’s killer cops be prosecuted for murder?**

**There are some holes in the law on federal supremacy, and rising public sentiment for basic justice.**

When federal cops run amok, brutalizing and now and then murdering those in their way, what can states do about it?

The Trump administration’s answer is: nothing. Until recently, that nada was conventional wisdom, too. A 1890 Supreme Court decision,

**In re Neagle**, held that state or local prosecution of the feds would undermine federal law and federal supremacy. In 1971, the Court did say that a federal official could be sued by victims for monetary damages for violating the Constitution, but subsequent rulings, as the Court has tilted steadily rightward, have pared that right back to near invisibility.

But the Minnesota killings by ICE and the Border Patrol, coming atop their family-sundering and community-paralyzing sweeps in Los Angeles and Chicago, have compelled Democratic governors and state legislators to try to find ways to hold the masked murderers and their ilk accountable. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed into a law a bill that enables state residents to sue miscreant ICE agents, even as a comparable bill has just been passed by the California State Senate and sent to the Assembly. Democratic governors in trifecta states are also setting up accountability commissions to investigate the lawbreaking of Trump’s cops, though those cops have refused to make state and local prosecutors and police privy to any federal investigations of such lawbreaking, much less accumulate evidence to conduct investigations of their own.

Are there holes in this stone wall? Following the murder of Renee Good, my colleague David Dayen **cited** [link removed] a number of cases in which state and local prosecutors indicted, and in some instances convicted, federal authorities. And in a **paper** [link removed] posted on Tuesday, Alicia Bannon of State Court Report and the Brennan Center argued that there are other cases that establish the grounds for such prosecutions. She cited a 2001 ruling by the Ninth Circuit permitting an Idaho prosecutor to proceed with a case against an FBI agent who’d shot an unarmed woman during the Ruby Ridge raid. (The subsequent prosecutor dropped the case.) Even more on point, she wrote that

in 1906, in a case with similarities to the Pretti killing, the Supreme Court **allowed** [link removed] Pennsylvania to prosecute two soldiers charged with killing a civilian accused of stealing from a federal arsenal. Several witnesses said the man had already been captured when the soldiers opened fire. If true, the Court wrote, “it could not reasonably be claimed that the fatal shot was fired in the performance of a duty imposed by the federal law.”

I should add that the Supreme Court in 1906 was not known for its liberalism. One year previous, its ruling in the

**Lochner** case struck down any effort to regulate hours and wages and the like as a violation of the God-given laissez-faire tenets and divine right of employers that they believed to be encoded in the Constitution.

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Several of today’s justices are at least as conservative, and demonstratively more partisan, than their 1906 predecessors, however. Even were they not, there will doubtless be Trump administration blowback against blue states if they dare to prosecute the president’s thugs, though state laws permitting ICE victims to file suits likely pose fewer such dangers. Given popular sentiment against the killings and the routine brutality with which ICE and the Border Patrol have treated immigrants, citizens, protesters, and bystanders, however, prosecutions (however questionable they may look to the courts) look to me to be politically possible, not to mention morally necessary. If the Democrats can capture the House, and even more so, the Senate, in November’s midterm elections, the political space for such prosecutions would likely expand alongside the legislative constraints on ICE and its helpmeets.

Some MAGA-fied Southern states, of course, seem as bent on doubling down on the Trump cops’ brutality as they are on celebrating that of their Confederate ancestors. A bill moving through the South Carolina legislature would require all county sheriffs to sign written agreements pledging their ongoing help to ICE. A bill introduced by Republicans in the Tennessee legislature would authorize agents to go into all K-12 schools to verify the immigration status of the children enrolled there, though a 1982 Supreme Court decision held that schools must be open to all children regardless of their immigration status. (That was one basis for striking down California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, which would have banned undocumented children from attending school.)

Historically—most particularly since the 1960s efforts to ban racial discrimination—it’s been the federal government that has asserted its power to prosecute state and local police when state and local prosecutors have refused to do so. Rogue police agencies have always been with us, but it’s only under Trump that federal police agencies have gone fully rogue. That has imposed a topsy-turvy dynamic on our federal system, but not on our Bill of Rights or on our moral values. If the law stands athwart our rights and our values, as it has at various periods of American history, it needs to be tested and prodded and challenged, as protesters are peaceably doing, as legislators are currently voting, and as the electorate will soon be weighing in, too.

Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large

Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large

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