Under a recent Supreme Court ruling, lawsuits alleging abuse by federal ICE agents have a narrow path to reach court.
Moments before and after Lenny Good ICE was shot in Minneapolis
Witnesses filmed the entire ICE operation in Minneapolis that ended in a shooting.
It may seem easy at first glance. ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, and her family has now hired a prominent law firm to seek justice. In many other situations, you might expect a lawsuit to occur within a few months and, if the officer does not settle, a jury trial within a few years.
But lawsuits involving federal employees follow a different, much narrower path — one shaped by decades of Supreme Court rulings and Congressional choices that have increasingly closed the court’s doors to civil lawsuits seeking justice.
“If you want to sue federal officials for violating the Constitution, you can’t even go to court,” Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the liberal Cato Institute’s Criminal Justice Project, told USA TODAY.
About 50 years ago, the legal prospects for families like Good’s looked bright. In 1971, the Supreme Court had just ruled in a case known as “Bivens” that a man could sue federal drug agents who entered his home without a warrant, handcuffed him, searched his apartment, arrested him and then strip searched him.
But over the past four decades, the Supreme Court has consistently rejected requests to allow other cases against federal employees to proceed, arguing that Congress created an alternative path for federal employees to file administrative claims against the U.S. government for committing one of a small list of crimes that could ultimately be argued before a judge rather than a jury.
This system stands in contrast to what people can do when local or state officials allegedly violate their rights. In these situations, Congress has authorized these officers to be taken directly to court, but plaintiffs must prove that the officers are not subject to certain immunity protections before a jury can hear the case.
As a result, the legal landscape becomes more difficult for individuals who claim they have been abused by federal employees.
“It would probably be impossible to sue individual immigration officials for violating constitutional rights,” said Emma Winger, deputy general counsel for the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit organization that promotes immigrant rights.
Mr. Good’s shooting was followed by a string of violent and controversial incidents involving immigration agents, including the shooting of two men in Portland, Oregon, on January 8, and the shooting of a man in the leg in Minneapolis on January 14. Federal authorities have defended their officers’ actions in all of these cases as self-defense.
Vice President J.D. Vance said Mr. Good was “trying to ram this guy with his car,” and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called that analysis a laughable “delusion.”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to USA TODAY’s requests for comment.
Here are the legal challenges facing Good’s family and others who say federal immigration officials violated their rights.
Why good families probably can’t go to court directly
The Supreme Court has not only expressed skepticism about extending its 1971 Bivens decision to new contexts. In recent years, it has also blocked lawsuits against federal immigration authorities.
In 2020, the court’s conservative majority ruled that the parents of a Mexican teenager who was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border cannot sue Border Patrol agents for allegedly violating the teenager’s constitutional rights.
In 2022, a conservative majority blocked a lawsuit by a U.S. citizen who claimed Border Patrol agents violated his constitutional rights by pushing him into a vehicle, throwing him to the ground and entering his property without permission.
In both of these decisions, the Supreme Court specifically stated that the authorization of lawsuits under the 1971 Bivens decision was “unfavorable” and expressed particular skepticism about lawsuits against border enforcement agents.
“What I’m saying is that (the Bivens ruling) is so chilling that functionally it’s not really a remedy,” Fox said.
Romanucci & Blandin, the law firm employed by Goode’s family, also acknowledged that it could not take the case directly to court, saying it may instead pursue an administrative lawsuit that could eventually lead to the courtroom.
Antonio M. Romanucci, a founding partner at the firm, said in a statement that “this process does not in any way preclude our passionate pursuit of justice on behalf of Renee Good.”
What can Mr. Good’s family do?
When the Bivens case was decided in 1971, Chief Justice William Brennan wrote on behalf of the Supreme Court’s majority that constitutional rights are “mere words” if federal employees cannot be sued for violating them.
But the Supreme Court recently ruled that these officers don’t have to be sued directly because Congress created an alternative means to address abuse through the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). A law that allows individuals to sue the U.S. government for damages when federal employees cause injury through tort or negligence., Assault by a federal law enforcement officer, etc.
However, the FTCA has its own limitations.
First, the FTCA only allows people to sue for a specific set of wrongdoings. For law enforcement officers, this may include assault, battery, and false imprisonment. These are different from constitutional violations under the Fourth Amendment, where a federal officer unconstitutionally seizes your property or uses excessive force against you. In these cases, there is no remedy under the FTCA unless the claim can be twisted into one of the covered civil violations.
Still, some constitutional violations may also be treated as civil wrongdoing under the FTCA. For example, a claim of excessive force by a federal law enforcement officer may constitute assault or battery under the FTCA. The challenge for plaintiffs like the Goods is fitting their claims into what the FTCA covers and getting past the exceptions that sometimes protect police officers anyway.
“There is still the possibility of restitution through FTCA litigation,” Winger said.
A second limitation on the claim is that plaintiffs are never entitled to a jury trial under the FTCA. Instead, if the government denies the administrative claim or fails to respond for six months, the plaintiffs can file a lawsuit and have a trial before a judge.
Fox says judges are often less appealing to plaintiffs than juries. Many of them first rose to the federal bench by working as federal prosecutors or representing the government as civil attorneys.
Imagine you are a plaintiff alleging that federal officers used excessive force against you, Fox said.
“Do you want a former federal prosecutor to make that decision? Or do you want your neighbor to make that decision? I certainly know which one to choose,” he said.
In a statement, Mr. Romanucci, the Good family’s attorney, characterized the FTCA process as “Byzantine” and “time-consuming” and complained that lawsuits under the law cannot be tried by a jury of local residents.
As ICE becomes more aggressive, Congress could take action
Good’s family’s law firm has expressed particular outrage at the difficulty of prosecuting federal officials for alleged wrongdoing, but they are not alone in their frustration with tactics used by immigration officials under the Trump administration.
For example, a group of people in the Los Angeles area sued the Trump administration in 2025, alleging that ICE agents were violating their constitutional rights by stopping people based on their race, the language they speak, and the type of work they do. The lawsuit sought an order to change ICE’s practices but was allowed because it did not seek monetary compensation.
A district judge in the case had barred ICE officers from stopping people based on broad demographic and location-based factors in July, but the Supreme Court blocked that ruling in September as the government continued to appeal.
Winger said previous administrations have taken a more targeted approach to immigration enforcement, but since Trump returned to the Oval Office, there has been a “dramatic increase” in indiscriminate immigration enforcement, use of force, racial profiling, and the creation of “theater” around immigration enforcement.
“We really need guardrails and ways to ensure that these officers comply with the law and are held accountable if they do not comply with the law,” she said.
The Trump administration has defended its tactics, saying government agents are questioning people based on reasonable suspicion that they are in the country illegally and that protesters are trying to prevent ICE from carrying out its mission.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a court filing that speaking Spanish or working on a construction site “increases the likelihood that someone is in the United States illegally,” arguing that these are factors that ICE officers can consider.
But some members of Congress agree with Winger.
A group of Democrats has introduced a bill known as the Bivens Act that would allow lawsuits against federal employees, just as lawsuits are already allowed against state employees. But without support from the Republican majority and the White House, it is unlikely to pass during the Trump administration.
“When federal employees violate the Constitution, they should be punished to the fullest extent to the same standards as state and local employees,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), one of the bill’s sponsors, said in a statement.
