# Fight Against Federal Overreach **FAFO** — officially the Fight Against Federal Overreach, and unofficially the cruder phrase the acronym is reverse-engineered from — is a coalition of nine locally elected American prosecutors, launched on **January 28, 2026**, that exists to bring **state** criminal charges against **federal** law-enforcement officers who violate state law. It was organized by Philadelphia District Attorney [[Larry Krasner]] after two fatal shootings by federal agents during immigration operations in Minneapolis earlier that month. ## What it actually does The coalition is infrastructure, not a prosecuting body. It has no charging authority of its own; each case belongs to the member's own office. What FAFO supplies is the three things a county prosecutor taking on the federal government does not otherwise have: **shared litigation strategy** across offices facing identical removal and immunity motions, **fundraising** to match a Justice Department that will contest every step, and political cover — nine offices making the same argument is harder to characterize as one rogue DA than one office is. Founding members span both the reform-prosecutor heartland and jurisdictions inside red states: Krasner in Philadelphia, [[Mary Moriarty]] in Hennepin County (Minneapolis), [[Steve Descano]] in Fairfax County and Ramin Fatehi in Norfolk (both Virginia), John Creuzot in Dallas, Laura Conover in Pima County (Arizona), and additional prosecutors from Texas, Arizona and Virginia jurisdictions. The Texas and Arizona membership matters: it means the coalition is not simply a blue-state bloc, and it puts member prosecutors under state governments actively hostile to the project. ## The legal theory and its obstacle The coalition's premise is that a federal badge is not a licence. Krasner has called the claim of "absolute immunity" for federal agents "completely false," arguing it cannot shield an officer who misuses force against an unarmed person; Descano summarized the posture by saying the members are in the "find out" business. The obstacle is real and unresolved. Under long-standing [[Supremacy Clause]] doctrine, a federal officer acting within the scope of federal duty has substantial protection from state prosecution, and such cases can be removed from state court to federal court — where the same Justice Department that employs the defendant controls the opposing brief. The contested question is what "within the scope" means when the person shot was not the target of the operation. No appellate court has settled it on these facts, which is precisely why the coalition was formed: the theory only becomes law if somebody litigates a case to conclusion. ## The first test: the Castro standoff Through 2026 the coalition's premise was tested not by collective action but by one member's case. [[Mary Moriarty]] charged the ICE officer [[Christian Castro]] in May 2026 over the January shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis ([[ICE Shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis]]) during [[Operation Metro Surge]]. Texas Rangers arrested him; then Governor [[Greg Abbott]] declined to honor Minnesota's extradition request, Minnesota Attorney General [[Keith Ellison]] sued Abbott to compel it, Castro was released from a Texas jail in August, and he was finally arrested in downtown Minneapolis in September 2026 after a federal false-statements indictment brought him north. A Republican governor refusing a Democratic attorney general's extradition warrant for a federal agent charged under state law is a federalism crisis of a kind the country has not seen in decades, and it arrived within eight months of the coalition's launch. Meanwhile the Justice Department demonstrated the other half of the problem from the inside: in the same case, department leadership overruled a line federal prosecutor who wanted to bring a civil-rights charge against Castro, permitting only a false-statements count — and the prosecutor who objected was fired days later. ## Why it matters here The vault's through-line for the [[Second Trump Administration]] is the systematic removal of institutional checks — inspectors general fired, agencies reorganized, US attorneys replaced, oversight bodies defunded. The locally elected county prosecutor is one of the few positions in the American system that the federal executive has no mechanism to touch: not appointed by it, not funded by it, not removable by it. FAFO is the recognition of that fact and the attempt to organize around it. Whether it works is an open question; that it is structurally unreachable is not. ## See Also - [[Larry Krasner]] · [[Mary Moriarty]] · [[Steve Descano]] · [[Sean Teare]] - [[Progressive Prosecutor]] — the movement these prosecutors came out of - [[Christian Castro]] · [[ICE Shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis]] · [[Operation Metro Surge]] — the first test case - [[Supremacy Clause]] — the doctrinal obstacle - [[Anti-Trump Resistance Timeline]] — where this sits in the broader arc