July 10, 2026 · Drain the Swamp · Philadelphia & Minneapolis

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‘Terribly Corrupt’: A Prosecutor Coalition Is Charging ICE Agents
— and Won’t Say Who’s Paying For It.

On January 28, 2026, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) and Hennepin County, Minnesota Attorney Mary Moriarty (DFL) announced a new coalition: the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, or FAFO — a name its founders chose knowing exactly what else the initials spell. The launch came three weeks after ICE and CBP agents fatally shot Renée Good during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, and four days after the same operation left Alex Pretti dead.

FAFO now counts ten elected Democratic prosecutors as members, coordinating to prosecute federal immigration agents under state law when local investigations find state-level crimes. It has already produced two criminal complaints against ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota. It has also produced a funding question its own members haven’t answered: according to the Washington Free Beacon’s reporting, FAFO’s own operating money comes from outside donors whose identities the coalition has not disclosed.

That undisclosed-donor claim traces to a single outlet’s reporting, not an independently verified public record — a distinction this page holds onto carefully, because it sits next to two other funding streams that are genuinely public: individual members’ disclosed campaign contributions, and a wholly separate dark-money network that funds Minnesota street activists who are not prosecutors and not part of FAFO at all. Legal experts say even the narrower, single-sourced claim raises real due-process questions. The coalition says it’s just accountability.

• 10 prosecutors — Krasner and nine other elected Democratic prosecutors make up the FAFO coalition as of its January 2026 launch · Source: Courthouse News; phillyda.org
• 2 agents charged — Gregory Donnell Morgan (two counts second-degree assault, April) and Christian Castro (four counts second-degree assault plus falsely reporting a crime, May) — both charged, not convicted · Source: Hennepin County Attorney's Office
• $0 disclosed — FAFO's own operating funds come from donors whose identities remain undisclosed, according to the coalition's own members, per the Washington Free Beacon's reporting · Source: Washington Free Beacon
• $40 million+ — disclosed nationwide spending by George Soros's Justice and Public Safety PAC network since 2012, electing roughly 75 progressive prosecutors — a separate, publicly disclosed stream from FAFO's own funding · Source: InfluenceWatch
• 2 deaths — Renée Good (Jan. 7, 2026) and Alex Pretti (Jan. 24, 2026), killed by federal immigration agents during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis — the events FAFO's founders cite as its origin · Source: CNN; coalition statements

FAFO’s origin story runs through Minneapolis. In January 2026, the Trump administration surged roughly 2,000 immigration agents into the Twin Cities under an operation federal officials called Operation Metro Surge. On January 7, federal agents shot and killed Renée Good. Seventeen days later, on January 24, the same operation left Alex Pretti dead. Both killings drew immediate protests and a wave of local scrutiny over what, if any, state-law consequences federal agents could face for conduct during immigration enforcement.

Four days after Good was killed, on January 11, Krasner posted a black-and-white photo of himself in sunglasses to X, captioned “FAFO,” with a warning attached: “To ICE and the National Guard: if you commit crimes in Philadelphia, we will charge you and hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law.” The Department of Homeland Security’s official account replied the same day with a meme — a gif of a figure dressed as a Founding Father captioned “Oh no. Anyways” — treating the warning as a punchline rather than a threat worth answering.

Four days after Pretti’s death, on January 28, Krasner and Moriarty made it official: the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a coalition of local prosecutors coordinating to charge federal agents who they conclude broke state law during immigration enforcement. Krasner told reporters the coalition would “hunt down” agents who cross that line “the way they hunted down Nazis,” and at points in the rollout referred to targeted agents as “wannabe Nazis” — language that drew its own round of criticism separate from the funding questions that followed.

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FAFO did not start as its own legal entity. Defiance.org — an anti-Trump advocacy group co-founded by former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor and Xander Schultz — says it “incubated” the coalition at launch, providing seed funding in an amount it has not disclosed, along with FAFO’s website. In March 2026, FAFO spun off into its own independent entity.

Its Virginia business registration lists FAFO’s principal office at the Washington, D.C. address of Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock — a law firm whose partners include former Democratic National Committee attorneys. The filing names three directors: Delvone Michael, a former Bernie Sanders campaign organizer who serves as criminal-justice director at the Working Families Party; James W. Conrad, a volunteer with Lawyers Defending American Democracy; and Ellen Yaroshefsky, a legal-ethics professor at Hofstra Law. The filing also states plainly that donations to FAFO are not tax-deductible — meaning the coalition is not currently organized as a 501(c)(3) charity, which would otherwise carry its own disclosure obligations.

FAFO’s roster reads like a map of the country’s highest-profile progressive-prosecutor movement. Every member is a Democrat or Democratic-Farmer-Labor officeholder; several were first elected with financial backing from George Soros’s prosecutor-focused PAC network, discussed separately below.

The four Virginia members joined together at the January 28 launch, giving FAFO its single largest state delegation outside Krasner and Moriarty’s founding pair. Descano and Dehghani-Tafti represent two of the Washington, D.C. suburbs most directly affected by federal enforcement activity in Northern Virginia, while Fatehi and Morales brought in the Hampton Roads region. Coalition members describe the group’s purpose as sharing strategy, issuing joint public updates on federal conduct in their jurisdictions, and coordinating accountability efforts — not a single joint prosecutorial body, since each member acts only within their own jurisdiction’s law.

The remaining four members round out the coalition’s national footprint. Garza prosecutes in Travis County, home to Austin, one of Texas’s most consistently Democratic jurisdictions and a frequent target of state-level preemption fights with Republican officials in Austin’s own statehouse. Conover holds the equivalent post in Pima County, anchored by Tucson, roughly 70 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border and squarely inside the corridor most affected by federal immigration enforcement in Arizona. George, in Chittenden County, is the coalition’s only New England member, based in Burlington. Creuzot rounds out the Texas delegation from Dallas County, though his position in the coalition is now transitional: he lost his March 2026 Democratic primary and will leave office once his successor is sworn in, raising an open question about whether Dallas County remains a FAFO jurisdiction once he departs.

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The coalition’s most concrete actions so far have come out of Moriarty’s office in Minneapolis. On March 24, 2026, Minnesota — through Attorney General Keith Ellison (D), Moriarty, and Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans — sued the Trump administration in federal court in Washington, D.C., accusing the Justice Department and DHS of withholding evidence in the Good, Pretti, and a related shooting investigation. Moriarty told reporters the federal government “has adopted a policy of categorically withholding evidence,” calling it unprecedented, and said her office was “prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid.”

On April 16, 2026, Moriarty’s office charged ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan with two counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, arising from a February 5 incident on the Highway 62 interchange with Interstate 35W in which Morgan allegedly pointed a handgun at two motorists after passing them illegally on the shoulder during rush hour. Moriarty’s office called it the first criminal charge filed against any ICE agent in the country. Morgan has been charged, not convicted; the allegations against him are, at this stage, allegations.

The following month, on May 18, 2026, Moriarty’s office charged Border Patrol agent Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, in connection with the January 14 shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis through the front door of a Minneapolis home. According to the criminal complaint, Castro initially told federal investigators that Sosa-Celis and a companion had struck him with a broom and a shovel before he fired — but surveillance video that prosecutors cited did not show anyone attacking Castro, and instead aligned with the account Sosa-Celis and his companion gave. Federal charges originally filed against Sosa-Celis and his companion were dropped by the Justice Department in February 2026. Castro was arrested in Harlingen, Texas on May 29, 2026 by Texas Rangers and agents from the DHS Office of Inspector General. As with Morgan, Castro is charged, not convicted, and disputes the allegations against him.

DHS did not accept the premise that Moriarty’s office had authority to bring either case. A DHS spokesperson called the Castro charges “nothing more than a political stunt,” arguing that “states do not have the authority to charge a federal law enforcement officer while performing his official duties” and that “federal officials acting in the course of their duties are immune from liability under state law” under the Supremacy Clause. DHS separately said the U.S. Attorney’s Office was investigating whether ICE personnel connected to the case had made false statements under oath, calling that “a serious federal offense” in its own right — an inquiry aimed at federal conduct, not at Moriarty’s prosecution. Neither Morgan nor Castro has yet had a federal-immunity defense resolved by a court; that legal question, like the underlying charges, remains open.

At the press conference announcing Morgan’s charges, Moriarty framed her office’s role in narrow, institutional terms rather than the “hunt you down” language Krasner used at FAFO’s launch: “Our role, by the way, is to hold people accountable if they violate the laws of the State of Minnesota, and in this particular case, we feel strongly that this agent committed second-degree assault against both of these victims.”

The word “secret” has attached itself to three different funding streams in coverage of FAFO, and they are not the same thing. Keeping them separate matters, because two of the three are matters of public record.

First, and the actual subject of the “secret donors” claim: FAFO’s own operating fund. According to the Washington Free Beacon’s reporting, coalition members say FAFO is funded entirely by outside donors whose identities remain undisclosed. FAFO is too new to have filed an IRS Form 990, and no dark-money tracker — OpenSecrets, InfluenceWatch, or otherwise — has independently identified who is writing those checks. This is a single-source claim, corroborated by the coalition’s own description of its finances as relayed to one outlet; it is not an independently verified public record.

Second, and entirely disclosed: the campaign funding that helped elect several FAFO members in the first place. George Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC network is FEC-disclosed public record, not secret. Pennsylvania and Philadelphia PAC affiliates in that network funneled more than $2 million to Krasner’s 2017 campaign, and the national network has spent more than $40 million since 2012 to help elect roughly 75 progressive prosecutors, according to InfluenceWatch. That is a real and well-documented fact about how some FAFO members got elected. It is not evidence about who funds FAFO itself, and conflating the two overstates what’s actually known about the coalition’s own finances.

Third, and also unrelated to FAFO: a separate dark-money network funding street-level activist groups in Minnesota, documented in a distinct Free Beacon investigation. That reporting found Open Society Foundations gave the Sunrise Movement $2 million since 2019, the Ford Foundation gave Unidos MN $400,000 in 2024, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund gave Copal MN $185,000 between 2021 and 2022, among other grants to groups that organized protests against ICE’s presence in the Twin Cities. None of those organizations — Sunrise Movement, Unidos MN, Copal MN, Defend the 612 — are prosecutors, and none are FAFO members. They are a separate story about a separate kind of funded activity, and this page keeps them separate rather than folding them into the FAFO donor question.

Legal experts who reviewed FAFO’s structure for the Free Beacon said the undisclosed-donor arrangement — taken on its own terms, as the coalition itself describes it — raises real institutional concerns, independent of whether the underlying charges against Morgan and Castro are ultimately proven. Rachel Paulose, managing attorney at the Upper Midwest Law Center and a former U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, called the setup “stunning” for a government-adjacent operation: “The notion that an arm of the government would accept outside money to prosecute or target a political opponent or an ideological foe seems vindictive and contrary to basic notions of fairness.”

“The notion that an arm of the government would accept outside money to prosecute or target a political opponent or an ideological foe seems vindictive and contrary to basic notions of fairness.”

Rachel Paulose, Managing Attorney, Upper Midwest Law Center; former U.S. Attorney, District of Minnesota

Paulose went further than optics: she said undisclosed funding behind a prosecution could constitute exculpatory material a prosecutor’s office owes to defendants under Brady v. Maryland — the Supreme Court precedent requiring prosecutors to disclose evidence favorable to the defense, including anything bearing on a witness’s or an office’s bias. If outside donors are shaping which federal agents get charged, she suggested, that funding relationship could itself be discoverable in Morgan’s and Castro’s defense.

John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment, was blunter, calling FAFO “a terribly corrupt arrangement” — the phrase the Free Beacon used as its headline. “That is not a situation that you want, where law enforcement is available to the highest bidder in any direction,” Hinderaker said. “It’s something that should be exposed and should be fought.”

“That is not a situation that you want, where law enforcement is available to the highest bidder in any direction. It's something that should be exposed and should be fought.”

John Hinderaker, President, Center of the American Experiment

FAFO’s own members have not, in public statements collected by the Free Beacon and other outlets, offered a rebuttal that names the donors or points to a public filing that would resolve the question. Notably, when the Free Beacon sought comment for its reporting, neither FAFO nor its founders responded. The coalition’s position, as reported elsewhere, is that its accountability work speaks for itself regardless of who is paying for it — a position that does not actually answer the disclosure question legal experts are raising, and a silence that, on a story specifically about undisclosed funding, is itself worth noting.

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