Things are changing. It’s not a murder charge but it’s some damn important progress.
| Christopher Armitage Apr 16, 2026 |
Image: Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announces charges.
Thank you, Mary Moriarty, for demonstrating the courage to do your job in this challenging moment.
Here is what has happened.
Gregory Donnell Morgan, Jr. was driving a black rental SUV east on Highway 62 in Minneapolis on the afternoon of February 5. He had no ICE markings on the vehicle. He was driving illegally on the shoulder to get around slower traffic. The driver of another car briefly pulled onto the shoulder to slow him down, then moved back into the legal lane.
Morgan sped up to pull alongside them. He slowed his car to match their speed. He rolled down his window. And he pointed his duty weapon directly at two people in the car next to his, while he kept driving illegally on the shoulder of the Crosstown.¹
That is the factual basis, in the words of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, for the first state criminal prosecution of a federal immigration agent since Operation Metro Surge began. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged Morgan on Thursday with two counts of second-degree assault; a nationwide warrant is now out for his arrest. Case number 27-CR-26-9656.¹
Let’s take a beat to stop and say plainly what just happened. An on-duty federal agent pulled a gun on two civilians during a petty traffic dispute on a public highway in broad daylight. He was not making an arrest or executing a warrant, though those would not be his duties or jurisdiction even if he had been asked to do them. He was angry that someone slowed him down on the shoulder, so he pointed a firearm at two human beings inside a moving vehicle. The Hennepin County Attorney just filed felony charges for it, and the Minnesota State Patrol assembled the evidence to do it.
Moriarty’s office explained in the release why this charging decision came faster than the ones still pending in the Good, Pretti, and Sosa-Celis cases. The State Patrol was able to investigate without federal obstruction or interference.¹ When state investigators are not locked out of crime scenes, evidence warehouses, and agent personnel files, they are more able to do their jobs. When the FBI withholds evidence and the Department of Homeland Security refuses to identify the agents involved in shootings, investigations become more difficult, though not impossible. Cases should still be prosecuted when publicly available evidence is sufficient even when the federal government is uncooperative.
Morgan is not a famous name, and that is part of the significance. The shooting of Renee Good drew tens of thousands of protesters into the streets;² the killing of Alex Pretti stripped Gregory Bovino of his Border Patrol command.² Morgan’s case is different: an on-duty agent had a wild road rage incident that led to them pointing his firearm at people. An easy case in terms of the facts, still deserving of credit because it is a first. Before today, no a single ICE agent had been charged for beating, murdering, or kidnapping since Trump was put into office. Waving a duty weapon in the face of innocents should result in charges, and after almost eighteen months and thousands of similar incidents, we finally have a prosecutor stepping up.
Over the last 4 months, Mary Moriarty has likely become the most visible County Attorney in the nation, which has produced unprecedented scrutiny and public engagement in how she does her job. That is a good thing, and something for people everywhere to take note of. Learn who your County Attorney and District Attorney are, and set expectations with them.
She has been clear from the day Renee Good was killed that federal agents do not enjoy absolute immunity from state criminal law, though charges have been painfully slow to materialize and there has been minimal transparency over what seem to many like unnecessary delays. Her office has also issued Touhy demands, filed a federal lawsuit against DHS and DOJ for withholding evidence, and opened criminal investigations into seventeen separate incidents.⁴ She has walked her staff and her community through months of work to get to this charging decision. Today’s filing is the first product. More should follow.
I want to thank you all. The Existentialist Republic community is verifiably responsible for thousands of calls to Mary Moriarty’s office. Thousands of emails filled her staff’s inboxes. ER members stood on Minneapolis sidewalks handing out flyers to thousands of their neighbors, face to face, for weeks.
Credit most importantly belongs to the Minneapolis protesters who stood in the streets during single digit temperatures while federal agents fired pepper balls at them, as well as volunteering to follow and document ICE activities. I was fortunate enough to cover the story firsthand in January and February, watching everyone from suburban soccer moms to retired educators to young Uber drivers get assaulted, threatened with deadly weapons, and stalked just for gathering footage of what was happening. They created the public record that made this accountability thinkable.
Local activists, journalists, and organizers have never stopped demanding justice. That community has set the example in a way we should all emulate.
Special thanks as well to Minneapolis journalists at the Star Tribune, the Minnesota Reformer, Sahan Journal, MPR News, and KARE 11 for refusing to accept DHS press releases as fact and for publishing what the video actually showed.
This is how state prosecutors bring criminal charges against federal agents. Prosecutors need evidence they can touch. They need public support that covers their political flank. They need a community that does not go home when the news cycle moves on. Something is changing. Celebrate it and keep showing up. Louder, too.
The fight is not over, but the exits are narrower than the administration wants you to believe. Morgan’s lawyers will almost certainly succeed in moving the case to federal court under 28 U.S.C. § 1442. Removal is routine, and the bar is low. Removal does not erase the charge. A federal judge still applies Minnesota’s second-degree assault statute to the same facts. Morgan walks free only if he also wins a Supremacy Clause immunity defense, and that doctrine is narrow. Under In re Neagle and the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Martin v. United States, the agent must prove he was performing an authorized federal duty, that his conduct was necessary and proper to that duty, and that he had an honest and reasonable belief it was necessary. Morgan fails every prong. Driving illegally on the shoulder of the Crosstown in an unmarked rental car during a road-rage dispute is not an ICE duty. Pointing a loaded weapon at two civilians to retaliate for being slowed down is not necessary or proper to enforcing immigration law. No reasonable federal officer could honestly believe it was.
The administration will still attack Moriarty personally, and the Department of Justice, which caved on its “investigation” into her office back in February,⁵ may try again.
But a wall just came down. For the first time since Operation Metro Surge began, a federal immigration agent is a named criminal defendant in a state court of law, with an active nationwide warrant for his arrest on felony assault charges. Every state prosecutor in America who has been told that a federal badge means automatic immunity just received a template for how to prove otherwise. Moriarty’s office has given them the roadmap and the case number. Sixteen more incidents remain under investigation in Hennepin County alone, and every state in the country now has a working example of how to do this.
We said from the beginning that state prosecution was the mechanism that worked. We said the federal immunity claims don’t hold up against openly criminal conduct. Today, Mary Moriarty proved it. Tomorrow, we build on it.
Feel free to thank Mary Moriarty for enforcing the law:
Office Email: Mary.Moriarty@hennepin.us
Office Phone: 612-348-5550
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Works Cited
Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. (2026, April 16). Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charges ICE agent with two counts of second-degree assault for February incident on Hwy 62. https://www.hennepinattorney.org/news/news/2026/April/morgan-charges ¹
Britannica. (2026). 2025–26 Minnesota ICE Deployment. https://www.britannica.com/event/2025-26-Minnesota-ICE-Deployment ²
Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. (2026, March 2). HCAO launches new evidence portal, establishes Transparency and Accountability Project. https://www.hennepinattorney.org/news/news/2026/March/tap-portal ³
Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. (2026, March 24). Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, State of Minnesota, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension sue federal government for access to evidence related to Metro Surge shootings. https://www.hennepinattorney.org/news/news/2026/March/federal-lawsuit ⁴
Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. (2026, February 27). HCAO statement on U.S. Department of Justice caving on “investigation” into office policy. https://www.hennepinattorney.org/news/news/2026/February/doj-response ⁵
