ICE Agent in ‘Ambush’ Federally Charged with Fibbing

Back in January, during the chaos of Operation Metro Surge, ICE agent Christian Castro shot a man named Julio Sosa-Celis through a closed front door.

DHS’s original story claimed Sosa-Celis and two other men ambushed Castro with a snow shovel and a broom handle, forcing him to fire what officials called a “defensive shot” to save his own life. That story didn’t survive contact with reality. Video from a city-owned camera showed the shovel getting dropped almost immediately and never picked back up.

Prosecutors ended up dismissing the charges against Sosa-Celis and his roommate with prejudice, admitting the evidence was “materially inconsistent” with what had been claimed under oath. Minnesota then turned around and charged Castro himself with four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, alleging he fired through that door while under no threat at all, putting a bullet into the wall of a child’s bedroom on the way to hitting Sosa-Celis in the leg.

Now there’s a new charge against Castro, and it’s a fucking joke. A federal grand jury indicted Castro this week, not for the shooting, not for endangering a kid asleep a few feet from where that bullet landed, but for lying to investigators about it. Six counts, all centered on making false statements.

Somewhere out there is a man is nursing a bullet wound he took through his own front door while his family watched, and the federal government’s response is to prosecute the paperwork.

Before we continue, the state and federal cases aren’t the same fight. Minnesota’s case, the one Hennepin County filed back in May, is about the shooting itself with assault charges tied to Castro firing his weapon and injuring someone.

The federal case is narrower and, frankly, safer for the government to bring. It’s about Castro allegedly lying to federal investigators afterward, which is its own crime, but it lets prosecutors punish the cover story without ever having to argue in court that the shooting itself was unlawful.

One case is about what Castro did to Sosa-Celis. The other is about what Castro said about what he did to Sosa-Celis. Guess which one the feds picked.

None of this would even be happening if Texas Governor Greg Abbott hadn’t refused to sign an extradition warrant. Minnesota wanted Castro sent back to face the state charges, and that required Abbott’s signature. He never gave it.

Because Castro hadn’t agreed to leave Texas voluntarily, the state had to hold him under a 90-day detention limit while waiting on the governor, and when that clock ran out with no signature in sight, a federal judge had no choice but to let Castro go.

Abbott’s office responded to the criticism by saying Texas “stands ready and willing to assist federal partners” if needed, which is a nice thing to say after you’ve spent three months being the reason nobody could touch the guy.

Todd Lyons, who was acting head of ICE at the time, said video evidence showed that “sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” and called lying under oath “a serious federal offense.” That was months ago. It’s taken this long for the Justice Department to actually act on Lyons’ own words, and even now, acting on them means charging Castro with the mildest charge ever.

However, Castro’s indictment is a milestone, technically.

Castro is the first federal agent charged criminally for conduct during this administration’s immigration crackdown. The first. After thousands of arrests, after protesters and residents were beaten, gassed, and shot at across multiple cities, and after agents killed American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti within weeks of shooting Sosa-Celis, the Justice Department finally found a case worth bringing, and it’s a lying charge.

Bodies keep dropping. Nobody’s been charged for the bodies. Somebody fibbed to an investigator about a leg wound, and that’s where the line finally got drawn.

To make matters worse, ProPublica reported that DOJ officials blocked a federal prosecutor who wanted to bring civil rights charges against Castro. Sosa-Celis’s attorney, Robin Wolpert, put it about as bluntly as a lawyer is allowed to. Castro lied “to cover up the fact that he shot my client through the door of an occupied house without a self-defense justification,” and the government has “grossly undercharged this case.” She’s not wrong. Somewhere inside the DOJ, someone looked at the evidence, decided it supported a civil rights prosecution, and got told no anyway.

Even the government’s own paperwork couldn’t keep its story straight. The original federal charges against Sosa-Celis and his roommate Alfredo Aljorna leaned on an FBI affidavit that contradicted DHS’s public version of events. DHS said Sosa-Celis was one of the men who broke free and started swinging at Castro. The FBI’s own affidavit said it was Aljorna who fled and that Sosa-Celis struck Castro with a broomstick.

Two federal accounts of the same ten seconds, and they don’t even agree with each other. That’s before you get to the cellphone video of a 911 call describing a man chased to his own home and shot in front of his family, which lines up with neither official version.

Castro has been suspended without pay this whole time, which I guess is meant to look like accountability. I’ll go out on a limb and guess the reason he’s suspended and not fired outright is that he only shot a man through a door instead of finishing the job, because if the recent history of federal immigration enforcement has taught us anything, it’s that “shot someone” tends to be a survivable career event and “lied about it on camera” is apparently where the institution finally finds its balls.

So that’s where we are. Christian Castro is sitting in federal custody tonight. Not for firing a bullet through a closed door into a home with children inside. Not for the lie that got two men falsely charged and briefly ruined. He’s in custody for fibbing.

Meanwhile, the masked agents who have killed people are still on the job.

(Sources)