According to Vice President J.D. Vance, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis cannot be prosecuted for it by Minnesota officials. “The precedent here is very simple,” Vance declared. “You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action—that’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity. He was doing his job.”
But the precedent is not actually so simple. In an 1890 case known as In re Neagle, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a federal marshal named David Neagle was “not liable to answer in the Courts of California” after he fatally shot the would-be assassin of a Supreme Court justice named Stephen Field during an attack on Field that occurred on a train traveling through California (Neagle was present as Field’s official bodyguard). “Under the circumstances,” the Court said, Neagle “was acting under the authority of the law of the United States, and was justified in so doing.” Therefore, “he is not liable to answer in the courts of California on account of his part in that transaction.”
Vance may have been thinking of In re Neagle when he claimed that ICE agents possess “absolute immunity” from state prosecution. However, In re Neagle was not the Supreme Court’s final word on the matter.
Hellbound and Down 