When federal officers break the law, how can state prosecutors hold them accountable for criminal conduct? Since this past spring, a team of law students, led by Professor Emerita Deborah Ramirez, has been building the answer through the Roadmap Project, an initiative of the Criminal Justice Task Force at Northeastern Law’s Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR). The goal of the Roadmap Project is to help state prosecutors prepare to contest Supremacy Clause immunity — a long-standing doctrine that has governed whether federal officers can stand trial for state criminal charges, and to do so in where state prosecutors rarely find themselves: a federal district court.

To date, the Roadmap Project has trained eight district attorneys representing more than 10 million people across the country and recruited former federal agents ready to consult and testify against the agencies they once worked for, offering prosecutors an inside perspective on federal training and use-of-force practices. “This is a difficult fight, but far from impossible,” said Ramirez, founder and director of the Criminal Justice Task Force. “If district attorneys are prepared, they may be able to overcome immunity, and potentially even get their case remanded to state court for trial.”

Over the course of the project, the team has uncovered a number of doctrinal and practical hurdles presented by Supremacy Clause immunity and by federal officer removal. In a recent opinion piece, “Federal accountability for ICE has vanished. States must fill the void,” published in The Boston Globe, Ramirez and Max Reese, former research director of the Roadmap Project, argue that “if the federal government has chosen to shut the door on accountability, the states should open theirs. It is critical that state prosecutors form a strategy to ensure that there are full professional state investigations into all potential misconduct. Governors, attorneys general, local district attorneys and law enforcement must work together to build the institutional infrastructure to make criminal accountability a reality.”