Conover joins nat’l group of DAs pledging to prosecute federal agents who violate local laws

Pima County Attorney Laura Conover joined other county prosecutors and district attorneys on Wednesday to announce the launch of the “Fight Against Federal Overreach,” a group that bills itself as an effort to “hold federal officials accountable when they exceed their lawful authority.” 

The group was created “amid growing concerns about warrantless entries, unlawful detentions, and coercive enforcement tactics by federal agents” and said they intend to ensure “constitutional limits on federal power are actively enforced through lawful institutions,” the organizers said.

The coalition is backed in part by Defiance.org, an organization which calls itself a “club for courageous Americans” devoted to thwarting Trump’s “revenge campaign” through “peaceful, lawful, defiant action to defend democracy from a wannabe dictator.”

The Fight Against Federal Overreach — an oblique reference to the oft-quoted phrase “Fuck Around and Found Out” — was formed this month, part of a wider backlash to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Over the winter, the administration sent thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents into Minneapolis, Minn. 

‘If you break state law and you cause us harm, I will do everything in my
power to bring you into court and to hold you to account.’ — Conover

As the operations continued in the frozen city, immigration agents were countered by thousands of protesters, and agents often responded brutally, filling city blocks with tear-gas and pepper spray, and shooting and killing two people.

Trump administration officials sought to blame both victims, but the incidents inspired an increasingly dim view of the operations in Minneapolis. 

This week, Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino was removed from his role as “commander at large” and cashiered back to his job in the El Centro Sector in California, and Congress has demanded Todd Lyons, the acting head of ICE, and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott appear to testify in February. A federal judge blasted ICE for repeatedly lying in court, and moved to put Lyons under oath to answer questions if a detainee was not released. Rather than have Lyons appear, the administration quickly released the person from custody.

FAFO’s domain URL was registered just on Sunday.

Along with Conover, the participants in FAFO include district attorneys from Minneapolis, Philadelphia, four cities in Virginia, and Dallas and Travis County (Austin), Texas. The group said officials will “share strategies and best practices among
prosecutors, provide regular public updates on efforts to rein in
unlawful federal conduct and educate the public on what paths are
legally available, and coordinate on accountability efforts across
jurisdictions.”

“No agency and no officer is above the law,” said Larry Krasner, the district attorney for Philadelphia, in a published statement. “When federal agents exceed their lawful authority, local prosecutors have both the power and the duty to act. The project exists to ensure that accountability is real, coordinated, and enforced through lawful institutions.”

Krasner told reporters during a Zoom call on Wednesday that the assembled prosecutors have “fought hard for even-handed justice” and have often done so while making sure law enforcement officers are held accountable when they commit “serious crimes.” 

“Simply put, this is an organization for local prosecutors who take their oath seriously, including their oath to preserve the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” Krasner said. “We find ourselves in a moment when one of the most potent tools—one of the most effective tools to try to preserve democracy in the United States—are state prosecutors.” 

“Why? Well, simply because we do have—despite the misinformation you have heard from the mouth of the vice president—we do have the ability to bring state criminal charges against federal officials,” he said. This could include criminal prosecutions for criminal homicide, or promoting a cover-up—including tampering with evidence, perjury, false oaths—or physical assault. 

“There’s any number of charges that could potentially arise in various jurisdictions where we are seeing, sadly, certain individual ICE officers and federal officers going rogue,” Krasner said.

Krasner noted that state convictions are not eligible to be pardoned by Trump or any president, and sharply-criticized Vice President JD Vance, who claimed during a Jan. 8 press conference the ICE agent who shot and killed 37-year-old Renée Good in Minneapolis is “protected by absolute immunity”

“Yes, I understand that our vice president came up with a highly creative and completely false theory that he calls ‘absolute immunity.’ Well, that is absolute nonsense,” Krasner said. He said there is a “sliver of immunity” that protects law enforcement officers from prosecution who shoot a young mother “with no criminal record and no weapon in the side or back of the head,” Krasner said.

He also referenced the Saturday killing of 37-year-old Alex Pretti, saying there’s no protection for the federal agents who disarmed a suspect and then “repeatedly shoot him in the back.”

He said it was very clear the “circumstances didn’t require any of that—that it was not reasonable, it was not necessary to carry out their duties,” Krasner said. He admitted he was speaking on the two killings with “limited information, but we’re not blind, and we do know the difference between what we see and what we hear.” 

Steve Descano, the county attorney for Fairfax, Va., made similar arguments.

“We’re in bad times because we have a federal government that is deploying masked agents to occupy American cities with the explicit guarantee that they have full immunity to do whatever it is that they want,” Descano said. “The chaos you’re seeing on the streets, the beatings, the abductions, the killings of everyday Americans just like you and me, these are the natural consequences of a federal government that thinks they’re above the law and the rest of us are below it.” 

“I want all those agents to hear me when I say, you do not have total immunity for your actions. If you break state law, you’ll have to answer to state authorities,” he said.

Conover noted her legal fight last year over Julio Cesar Aguirre, a Mexican man whose prosecution created a rift between her office and federal prosecutors.

She said recent actions in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis created a “crippling fear” among half of the people in Pima County. People “fear to go to school, fear to go to work, fear to just live,” Conover said. She added she’s also begging people to “remain calm, to be smart, to go out there and protest as a community and do it peacefully, And to use de escalation, even when we’re faced with escalation and high risk on the other side.”

Conover’s office has encouraged people to submit videos and photos that show “improper or illegal conduct” after ICE stepped up activity in Tucson, and the Tucson mayor and City Council asked municipal staff to draw up an ordinance denying ICE agents the use of city property for staging deportation operations, except when the law absolutely requires it.

The Pima County attorney, an elected Democrat, said federal agents need to know if they operate in Pima County, “I don’t care what you are wearing or what agency you claim, if you break state law and you cause us harm, I will do everything in my power to bring you into court and to hold you to account.”

“These are the promises we’re having to make to our communities, because the local DAs are the number-one voice being heard right now, and the last line of defense against our community facing true harm,” Conover said.

In response to questions about the complexity of such cases, Conover said these are “highly specialized cases” that become a “battle of the experts” between well-funded Justice Department officials and county attorneys. However, she noted in Aguirre’s case last summer, she was able to force a resolution in her favor. Conover said she has worked to help officials in Minnesota by sending pleadings and litigation from the case.

She said she showed those officials how Pima County responded when “evidence is stolen from us, when a suspect is stolen from us, and how to get it back, how to go into court and argue that we have authority to have equal access so that we can hold people to account if they break state law.”

Conover’s office repeatedly attempted to charge former Tucson Police Officer Ryan
Remington for manslaughter after he shot and killed a man in a
wheelchair during a 2021 incident, however the case collapsed after
multiple grand juries refused to indict him.

Ramin Fatahi, the county attorney for Norfolk, Va., said he understood federal law enforcement officers might have to make “split-second decisions.”

“We get that, but the law applies to them with absolutely equal force, with the same protections and the same responsibilities and the same liabilities as a private citizen. And part of the reason people don’t trust the justice system is that there is a double standard,” Fatahi said.  “The federal government and the president want there to be a double standard. We are here to say that there isn’t a double standard.” 

The group said they would hold a meeting in early February to “share strategies for pushing back against the
lawless actions of federal forces in states and cities around the
country.”

“The American people deserve and indeed need to know that local leaders are working together to defend their constitutional rights,” said Mary Moriarty, the DA for Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.