DOJ Charges ICE Agent With Lying, Not Shooting

The federal government indicted its own ICE agent for lying about a shooting, and the prosecutor who fought to get a real charge fired the same week, and the man who fired him is now on leave.

"This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney. I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn't enough."

— Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans, to the lawyers for the man his own agency shot

The first thing to understand is that this is not a protest piece. It is a paperwork piece, and the paperwork is worse than any protest.

On January 14, in the thick of Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration's immigration blitz into Minneapolis, an ICE officer named Christian Castro fired a single shot through the closed front door of a duplex while two one-year-old children slept inside. The bullet struck Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg and buried itself in the wall of the child's room. Minnesota prosecutors later described the moment plainly: Castro fired "knowing there were people who had just run inside."

For a while, the government's version was a story of a man under mortal threat. DHS said Castro had been ambushed and beaten with a broom and a shovel by three men, and it called Sosa-Celis and his cousin Alfredo Aljorna "violent criminal illegal aliens." Federal prosecutors charged them with assault. Then the surveillance footage surfaced, and the whole thing inverted.

A federal judge ordered the two men released. ICE picked them up before they had left the courthouse, and another federal judge ruled that detention was illegal. Their witness, a nineteen-year-old, was hauled out of state, and when a New Mexico judge learned she and Aljorna's one-year-old had been badly burned and needed emergency surgery, he ordered her freed. Days later the government dropped its own case against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, citing "newly discovered evidence."

Translation: the men the government called violent criminals were the ones who got shot, and the government's own video proved it.

What happened next is the part that should make every American nervous.

Castro told the FBI that three men had beaten him with a broom and a shovel for several minutes and that he had fired while sitting on the ground, scared for his life. The indictment now unsealed says the actual scuffle "occurred over a period of approximately eleven seconds." That is a man describing a beating that, in the version that held up, never happened.

The charge he faces federally is six counts of making materially false statements, one for each lie. Not the shooting. Not the door. Not the children behind it. The lies.

This is the first time the Justice Department under this administration has charged an ICE officer for conduct on the job during the nationwide surge. That rarity is the entire point. It is not a sign of a system working. It is a sign of a system that had to be dragged, by the facts themselves, toward acknowledging that one of its own officers fired into an occupied home and then invented a fight to justify it.

The civil rights charge is the story behind the story, and it is the one that got someone fired.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota had been preparing to charge Castro with deprivation of rights under color of law, the same kind of charge carried against Derek Chauvin over George Floyd, one that can carry a heavy prison sentence. Matthew Evans, the assistant U.S. attorney leading the case, believed the evidence supported it.

Then, late on a Tuesday, he told the victims' lawyers to prepare for something else. Only false statements.

"This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney," Evans wrote, in an email obtained by ProPublica. He said the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota and officials at DOJ headquarters overruled him on the civil rights charge. "I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn't enough." He called it an honor to work the case, which is what people say when they are leaving.

By Thursday, sources told ABC News, Evans was fired. DOJ maintains the civil rights probe is still ongoing and that no decision has been made. CNN reported he is now under investigation for alleged obstruction of a grand jury. An auto-reply from his office says he is on leave.

The pattern is becoming a genre. ProPublica found that in almost every instance of an immigration agent shooting someone, this administration blamed the victim within hours and, in many cases, local or federal police declined to investigate. When ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good in her car the week before Sosa-Celis, agents said she had driven at them, but the video showed her wheels turned away. DOJ first agreed to a joint investigation, then refused to cooperate, deeming any review unnecessary.

Sosa-Celis' lawyer Robin Wolpert put it more directly than the government will: "He made them to cover up the fact that he shot my client through the door of an occupied house without a self-defense justification. The federal government has grossly undercharged this case."

Here is the other layer, the one that turns a bad case into a story about who is accountable to whom.

Castro fled the scene to Texas. Minnesota wanted him back to face state assault charges. Gov. Greg Abbott sat on the extradition paperwork for months, citing "serious doubts" that Castro qualified as a fugitive. Minnesota's Attorney General Keith Ellison sued to force it. A federal judge declined to intervene. After ninety days in a Texas jail, Castro was released last week, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has publicly said she worries he will flee, to Mexico, of all places.

So the man who fired into a home with two babies asleep, then lied to the FBI about it, is currently unindicted in the state that wants him most, free on federal false-statement charges, and possibly on the move.

The indictment reads like a government apologizing for the truth, in the smallest available font.

Strip it down and the structure is the whole story: a man shot someone through a closed door, invented a fight to cover it, the video proved the fight never happened, the state tried to hold him and a friendly governor stalled, the feds came in and charged him with the part that was easiest to prove, and the one prosecutor who pushed for the charge that actually fit the facts is now on leave.

Nobody is prosecuting the shooting. That is not an accident. That is the design, and the design has a name on it now.

The question was never whether this was corrupt. The question was who you trust to notice, and what happens to them when they do. Evans noticed. Evans objected. Evans is on leave. That is the answer, and it was always the answer.

Tags: ice, minneapolis, doj, immigration