ICE officer charged over shooting of Immigrant in Minnesota
America ı By Rihem Akkouche
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He was standing outside in the January cold, holding a snow shovel, when federal immigration agents arrived. By the time the confrontation ended, Julio Sosa-Celis had a bullet in his leg — and the ICE officer who fired it had fled with a story that surveillance video would later contradict in devastating detail. On Monday, that officer was charged with a crime.
Christian Castro, 52, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, now faces a nationwide arrest warrant after Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime — charges that pierce the wall of federal immunity that has surrounded the Trump administration's militarized immigration crackdown in Minnesota and expose an agent to state criminal accountability in what prosecutors describe as conduct with no modern precedent.
"A federal badge does not make him immune from state charges for his criminal conduct in Minnesota," Moriarty said at a news conference Monday, her words carrying the weight of a legal system asserting jurisdiction where the federal government has insisted none exists.
How the Shooting Happened — and What the Video Showed
The sequence of events that led to Castro firing his weapon on January 14 began with a chase — not of Sosa-Celis, but of another Venezuelan man, Alfredo Aljorna, who fled from federal agents in his vehicle, crashed into a snowbank, and ran toward his home. Sosa-Celis was standing outside that home, snow shovel in hand, when the agents arrived in pursuit.
What happened next became the center of a factual dispute that ultimately collapsed the government's own case. Federal authorities initially accused Sosa-Celis of attacking agents with the shovel and a broom — a narrative that Kristi Noem, then serving as secretary of homeland security, elevated to the level of "an attempted murder of federal law enforcement." Federal prosecutors charged Sosa-Celis with assaulting a federal officer.
Then came the video. Surveillance footage released by the city of Minneapolis showed Sosa-Celis dropping the shovel, both men running toward the house — and an agent firing in their direction as they fled. The US attorney's office subsequently dropped charges against both Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, citing evidence "materially inconsistent" with preliminary hearing testimony.
The agent's account, in other words, did not survive contact with the recording.
A State Investigation Stonewalled by Federal Agencies
The road to Monday's charges was neither straight nor smooth. Moriarty acknowledged that the state investigation had been significantly hampered by federal agencies' systematic refusal to share information with state prosecutors — a pattern of obstruction that forced investigators to reconstruct events through alternative channels while the federal government withheld the evidence its own agents had gathered.
"There's no modern precedent for what happened to the people here in Minnesota," Moriarty said. "So it requires a lot of us to dig in and look at ways to hold people accountable that we probably never thought we would be looking at in our careers."
The Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday. The DHS had previously stated, in a different context, that lying under oath was "a serious federal offense" and that making false statements could result in an officer being fired or prosecuted — a standard it has not publicly applied to Castro.
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