# Mary Moriarty **Hennepin County Attorney** (Minneapolis), elected in 2022 and in office since January 2023. She is not seeking re-election, and her term ends in January 2027. Before that she spent her career as a public defender, including as Hennepin County's chief public defender from 2014 to 2020. She is one of the most prominent figures of the [[Progressive Prosecutor]] movement, and in 2026 she became the prosecutor who tested whether state criminal law reaches a federal immigration agent. ## The Castro prosecution Moriarty's office charged ICE officer [[Christian Castro]] with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime over the January 14, 2026 shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis during [[Operation Metro Surge]] ([[ICE Shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis]]). At the time, the administration's public position was that its agents could not be held to account by states. The case turned into an interstate standoff. Governor [[Greg Abbott]] declined to extradite Castro from Texas, Attorney General [[Keith Ellison]] sued to compel it, and Castro was taken into Minnesota custody only on September 17, 2026, when a federal court date brought him back. Moriarty said that "when you are a fugitive from justice... you do not get to dictate how you are taken into custody." She expects Castro to try to move the case to federal court and claim Supremacy Clause immunity, and says her office will fight it. She is a founding member of the [[Fight Against Federal Overreach]] coalition convened by [[Larry Krasner]] on January 28, 2026. Hers is the case that has taken the coalition's legal theory furthest. ## The fights that defined the office - **The trooper case.** She charged State Trooper Ryan Londregan with murder in the 2023 shooting of Ricky Cobb II, then dropped the charges in June 2024 citing insufficient evidence. Both the charge and the dismissal drew fire. - **The Governor's reassignment.** Gov. [[Tim Walz]] moved a homicide case from her office to Ellison's after her office offered plea deals to juvenile defendants. - **The DOJ civil-rights probe.** In May 2025 the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, under [[Harmeet Dhillon]], opened an investigation into an office policy that told prosecutors to weigh racial disparities in plea negotiations. It was closed on February 27, 2026 after the office revised the policy's wording. DOJ called the revision a removal of "race-based considerations," and the office called it a clarification of a policy that had never authorized treating defendants differently by race. The office called the investigation "always a stunt." In August 2025 she announced she would not run again, saying she wanted to "focus on running the office, rather than running for office." In the August 11, 2026 primary to succeed her, DFL-endorsed state Rep. Cedrick Frazier and former U.S. Attorney Anders Folk advanced to November. Several candidates in the field ran on a promise to change course from her tenure. ## Why she matters to this vault Moriarty is both a target and a test case. For the right she is the model of the soft-on-crime progressive prosecutor, and a federal civil-rights investigation was aimed at her office's plea policy. For the resistance side, she is the prosecutor who charged a federal agent and held the charge through a governor's refusal to extradite. That is why the [[Fight Against Federal Overreach]] theory runs through her office. Hennepin County is also a defendant in the Justice Department's suit against Minnesota's sanctuary policies, which a federal judge dismissed in July 2026 ([[Sanctuary Jurisdiction]]). ## See also - [[Christian Castro]] · [[ICE Shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis]] · [[Operation Metro Surge]] - [[Fight Against Federal Overreach]] · [[Progressive Prosecutor]] · [[Larry Krasner]] - [[Keith Ellison]] · [[Greg Abbott]] · [[Harmeet Dhillon]] · [[Sanctuary Jurisdiction]]