Minnesota is doing what the feds won’t: holding ICE accountable

An ICE officer who allegedly shot a Minneapolis man when the Trump administration sent thousands of officers to Minnesota and lied about the series of events that led to the shooting was charged on Monday.

Christian J. Castro, the officer, is charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the shooting of Julio César Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, on January 14, just one week after the killing of Renée Good.

A federal agent shot Sosa-Celis in the thigh after he and another officer pursued Sosa-Celis’ roommate, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna. Hennepin County attorney Mary Moriarty said both Sosa-Celis and Aljorna reside in the US legally. The two men’s attorneys said that neither had violent criminal records. 

Federal authorities initially claimed that the two men assaulted a federal officer. The next day, former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the event—without evidence—an act of “attempted murder,” and said the men beat the officer “with snow shovels and the handles of brooms.” Then a widely-circulated video showed what really happened, contradicting the federal government’s statements, and the federal government changed their story.

The video shows Aljorna going to his home after crashing his car as Castro chases him. Sosa-Celis was outside and he, Aljorna, and Castro tussled but no weapons were used. The two men then run into their home when the officer shoots at them. 

The FBI said a week after the shooting that it was a case of mistaken identity.

In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune before she announced the charges, Moriarty said that their investigation into the incident revealed “no demonstrable trauma to [Castro’s] body, except for an abrasion to his left hand.” 

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, which covers all of Minneapolis, issued a nationwide arrest warrant for Castro. In April, the office charged another ICE agent for pointing his weapon at two people while driving illegally on the highway.

The state of Minnesota also sued the Trump administration in March, alleging that it withheld evidence in the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and the shooting of Sosa-Celis in order to prevent possible charges against their agents. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote in January during Operation Metro Surge, the federal government’s violence was intentional: 

Under pressure to meet the administration’s goal of 3,000 daily arrests, ICE has been on a hiring spree…The result of that expansion drive has been less than optimal, with recruits failing fitness tests and not undergoing proper vetting. Experts have also raised concerns about the lowering of standards and reduced training times for new hires.

And as I wrote in February following a congressional hearing, the heads of ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Citizenship and Immigration Services, largely deflected questions about killings by ICE officers. My colleagues have reported again and again that they clearly do not care. 

So it is up to local and state governments to hold the federal government accountable.

“There is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal officers who commit crimes in this state or any other,” Moriarty stated during a press conference announcing the charges on Monday afternoon.

But as she told the Minnesota Star Tribune, “While I understand people really want accountability and they saw what they saw in the [Good and Pretti] videos, this is incredibly complex. The last thing we want to do is make a mistake.”

It’s symptomatic of a system of failed accountability, and the cruelty is still happening today.