Federal prosecutors charged Christian Castro, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who fired through a closed door in north Minneapolis in January and struck a Venezuelan man in the thigh, with making false statements to investigators.
Thursday’s coverage treated that as a rare instance of the Justice Department holding one of its own immigration officers to account, and that framing has the story exactly backwards.
Castro faces a false statements charge and nothing heavier because the Justice Department in Washington refused to permit anything heavier. ProPublica reported the same day that leadership at Main Justice overruled the federal prosecutors in Minnesota who had prepared to charge Castro with deprivation of rights under color of law, the civil rights statute used against the officers who killed George Floyd in the same city. The assistant US attorney on the case, Matthew Evans, told lawyers for the victims to prepare for Castro to be charged “only with False Statements.”
The news here is not that an ICE officer was charged. It is that the charge is a ceiling Washington selected, not a floor that accountability finally reached.
What the Cameras Caught
On Wednesday, January 14, Castro and another officer chased Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna from a traffic stop to the duplex where he lived with Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Castro fired a single shot through the front door of an occupied home. It hit Sosa-Celis in the right thigh.
Federal authorities then told the public a different story than the one that happened. They accused Aljorna and Sosa-Celis of beating an officer with a snow shovel and a broom handle, and the Department of Homeland Security repeated that account publicly. Both men were charged. In February, federal prosecutors quietly dropped every charge against them and opened a criminal investigation instead.
The reason for the reversal became visible in April, when the City of Minneapolis released its surveillance footage. As CBS Minnesota reported, the video showed Sosa-Celis throwing the shovel into the snow and retreating before the scuffle the government had described as an ambush. FOX 9 found the same thing in the footage, and NBC News reported that the recording put the officers’ sworn account in direct question.
That sequence matters for reading Thursday’s charge correctly. The government did not merely get a shooting wrong. It built a criminal case against the two men who were shot at, on a version of events its own city’s cameras disproved.
The Charge That Was Prepared, and the One That Was Allowed
Deprivation of rights under color of law is the federal government’s central tool for prosecuting officers who abuse the people they police. It carries serious prison exposure, and it says something specific: that a person acting with state authority violated someone’s constitutional rights. A false statements charge says something much narrower. It says a federal employee lied to investigators.
The distance between those two charges is the distance between “you shot a man through a door and violated his rights” and “you were dishonest about it afterward.”
Evans fought the decision and lost. His account, in an email reviewed by ProPublica, is unusually blunt for a line prosecutor describing his own department:
I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.
The Minnesota Reformer reported that the block came from Washington rather than from the Minnesota US attorney’s office that had built the case. NPR confirmed the false statements charge on Thursday, and the Associated Press reported that the case remains sealed and was described by a person not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Castro is not walking free of everything. Hennepin County charged him in May with four counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and one count of falsely reporting a crime, and a state case is now the only place where the shooting itself is on trial. He was arrested in May, held in Brownsville, Texas while Minnesota sought his extradition, and released last week after a federal judge in Texas declined to keep him in custody. He has been suspended from ICE without pay since February.
A Sacred Sworn Oath, Selectively Enforced
ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, said that violations of the agency’s sacred sworn oath will not be tolerated. That line is doing an enormous amount of work, and it deserves to be measured against what his department actually permitted.
Our view is straightforward. A federal officer fired a bullet through the closed door of a home he knew was occupied, and the only federal charge he faces is for what he said afterward. That is not accountability. It is the appearance of accountability, produced by charging the smallest provable offense while the department declines the charge that would put the shooting itself in front of a federal jury. The people responsible are not in Minneapolis. They are the Justice Department officials in Washington who overruled the prosecutor who investigated the case and knew the evidence.
There is a further cost that is easy to miss. Evans’s blocked charge was not a stretch. His office had the surveillance video, the collapsed prosecution of the two victims, and the officer’s own contradicted statements. If a case that well documented cannot clear Main Justice, the practical message to 3,000 officers deployed under Operation Metro Surge is that the department will pursue you for lying and not for shooting.
That operation is the context the national coverage keeps dropping. Operation Metro Surge put more than 3,000 ICE and CBP officers into Minnesota and produced more than 4,000 arrests. Sosa-Celis was shot one week after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in the same city, in another incident where agents said she drove toward them and video showed her wheels turned away. Minnesota and Illinois were already suing the administration over the surge as unconstitutional.
What to Watch Now
The state case in Hennepin County is now carrying the weight the federal case set down. County prosecutors, not Washington, will decide whether a jury ever hears the question of whether firing through that door was a crime against the man behind it.
Watch also for whether Evans stays in the job. A line prosecutor who tells reporters he fought his own department as hard as he could and lost has made a choice about which record he wants to exist. The sealed federal case will eventually open, and when it does it will be worth reading for what it does not charge.