FBI agents told the bureau will no longer look into ICE confrontations, but senior officials are denying the report

Federal agents in field offices around the country have been told that the FBI would stop taking on investigations into physical confrontations involving immigration officers, according to a new report by The New York Times.

The account comes courtesy of reporters Hamed Aleaziz and Devlin Barrett, who attributed people briefed on the decision.

The outlet cites Thursday as the date the guidance went out in writing to bureau supervisors. Word reached ICE officers in various parts of the country through their FBI colleagues before the day was out.

Senior officials have rejected the characterization. In a joint statement issued to CNBC, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security described the agencies as partners in law. They also assured that their working relationship on cases involving assaults against federal officers has not been altered. 

The alleged change would alter which agency scrutinizes an immigration officer’s use of force. Where ICE personnel have shot someone, the bureau has ordinarily handled the question of what preceded the gunfire. 

The guidance described to the Times would route those cases to Homeland Security Investigations. That’s a unit sitting inside ICE itself and whose authority doesn’t extend to civil rights enforcement.

Incidents mount as ICE use-of-force cases pile up

Since the tragic events in Minneapolis that left two people dead, friction over how such cases are handled has been ramping up. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension withdrew from the case (per PBS News) when federal prosecutors stopped sharing case materials with it. Six federal prosecutors then stepped down over the direction the bureau was taking. 

And then there was the case of Tracee Mergen, a supervisor in the FBI’s Minneapolis office, who resigned after leadership in Washington pressed her to abandon a civil rights inquiry into Jonathan Ross — the officer who shot and killed Renee Good on January 7. (via The Guardian) Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old citizen, was also killed by federal agents in the same city on January 24.

Two deaths this month have reignited interest in the proceedings. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was shot on July 7 during a stop in Houston. Six days later, an ICE officer fatally shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national in his mid-20s who was cleared to work in the U.S., in Maine, according to the report by The Washington Post.

Sunday’s report also lands while Todd Blanche, leading the Justice Department in an acting capacity since April, waits on a Senate vote on his nomination as attorney general following a contentious two-day confirmation hearing this month.