Minneapolis ICE shooting charges allege agent who lied about attack fired through door with children inside
A federal officer faces charges in connection with a shooting in north Minneapolis that left a man wounded, and that two agents were caught lying about under oath.
The Hennepin County Attorney's Office announced charges against the officer on Monday. Christian Castro faces four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime.
"Mr. Castro is an ICE agent, but his federal badge does not make him immune from state charges for his criminal conduct in Minnesota," said Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty. "I've said it many times and I'll say it again — there is no such thing as absolute immunity for federal officers who commit crimes in this state or any other."
Moriarty says the criminal charges against Castro have "activated a nationwide warrant for his arrest," with her office adding, "his whereabouts are unknown and there is a substantial likelihood that [he] will not respond to a summons."
The night of the shooting
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan national, on Jan. 14 near North Sixth Street and North 24th Avenue. The officers involved wrongly accused Sosa-Celis and another man of assaulting them with a shovel and broomstick. The Department of Homeland Security repeated the false allegations. The agents were placed on leave for the lie, and federal assault charges against Sosa-Celis and the other man were dropped.
According to a criminal complaint, ICE agents in an unmarked car started chasing a man who was driving for DoorDash on Jan. 14. The man lived in a home with Sosa-Celis, two other adults and two children, which he drove to while being pursued.
The narrative from the complaint, which is based on video evidence and interviews with those involved, indicates once the man arrived at the home, he tried to run inside. Sosa-Celis ran out of the home and saw an ICE agent — later identified as Castro — catch the man and struggle with him. Sosa-Celis said he had a broomstick and swung it at Castro, but did not hit him.
The complaint states that Sosa-Celis and the other man made it inside the home, and while they were trying to shut and lock the door, Castro fired through it, hitting Sosa-Celis in the leg. All six occupants of the home, including the two children, were inside at the time.
"A violent crime did occur that night, but it was Mr. Castro who committed it," Moriarty said. "He shot through the door of a home with many people, including children, inside. While fortunately missing several others, his bullet did strike Mr. Sosa-Celis in the thigh."
Sosa-Celis said he and the other man ran upstairs and "attempted to barricade themselves inside the home," according to the complaint, at which point ICE agents "broke windows, deployed pepper spray inside the home and took him and the other occupants of the home into custody."
Paramedics were not allowed to tend to Sosa-Celis until about an hour after the shooting, the complaint states. After that, he was taken to a nearby hospital.
FBI is still uncooperative, Moriarty says
At the scene, investigators with the FBI and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension jointly interviewed an ICE agent. That agent recounted what Castro told him: that two people attacked him with a shovel and a broom before he shot one round.
"I would say that the BCA did a tremendous job of getting to the scene very quickly, where they heard FBI agents identifying this agent. They also did some follow up, which allowed us to get corroboration of the agent's name," Moriarty said.
After that interview, FBI agents at the scene told the BCA personnel they were directed not to work with them and "stymied all further efforts by the BCA to interview additional ICE agents or [Castro] himself," the complaint states.
"We did not have cooperation of anyone at the federal government to give us any of the evidence that we have. We still don't have any evidence that they might have collected," Moriarty said.
Castro's story at odds with witness accounts, video
Castro was examined at a hospital in Cambridge, Minnesota, and doctors found he "suffered no demonstrable trauma to his body except for an abrasion to his left hand at the base of his thumb," the complaint states.
Castro told the FBI that two people assaulted him while he struggled with the DoorDash driver — one with a broom and one with a shovel. He said he was "exhausted, alone, on the ground, and in fear of his safety," according to the complaint. He also said he fired the shot before the men entered the home.
The criminal complaint states Castro's version of the events "is contradicted by the video of the incident," four other accounts from those involved — including the DoorDash driver and another adult in the house — and physical evidence.
Sosa-Celis and the DoorDash driver had temporary protected status from the Department of Homeland Security at the time and were legally living in Minnesota, according to the complaint. Castro told the FBI he started a "high-speed pursuit" of the driver after running his vehicle's plates and finding "the registered owner of the vehicle was not a United States citizen."
About two months after the shooting, Minneapolis officials released surveillance footage of the encounter, which Mayor Jacob Frey said "makes it crystal clear that, just like in other situations during Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's account of what happened simply does not match the facts."
Moriarty: Castro can't get presidential pardon if convicted
Moriarty on Monday clarified that the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which restricts how states can interfere with federal law in criminal cases, does not give Castro "absolute immunity."
"It is a defense that a federal agent can raise. It has to be decided by a judge," Moriarty said. "We do expect [Castro's] defense to attempt to remove the case to federal court. Should a judge grant that motion, it would still be prosecuted by our attorneys. Should it end in a conviction, Mr. Castro will be ineligible for a presidential pardon."
Criminal defense attorney Joe Tamburino, who is not connected to the case, said in an interview with WCCO on Monday that Castro will "sooner rather than later" see a Minnesota courtroom, though he added that he'd "imagine" Castro's defense attorney will make a motion to move the case to a federal courtroom.
Tamburino says the move lays the foundation for the defense to make a motion to dismiss based on the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.
"If you prove that, as a local prosecutor, this particular federal gent Mr. Castro was acting outside of his duties, outside of authority, then you can prosecute. If you cannot, he's gonna get his case dismissed," he said.
When asked by a reporter if she knew of a "modern precedent" for what her office aims to achieve in prosecuting Castro, Moriarty countered that "there's no modern precedent for what happened to the people here in Minnesota."
"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," Moriarty said.
The shooting of Sosa-Celis came a week after federal agents killed Renee Good on the city's south side and 10 days before they fatally shot Alex Pretti. All three shootings occurred during the largest federal deployment of law enforcement in United States history.
"You have to look back to probably the American Revolution for a situation where an entity was encroaching on the colonists or the states they weren't states at the time, but people rose up because of that," Moriarty said. "We went through a period in the Civil Rights era where the federal government had to come into various states to help protect the rights of people in those states, and so they were somewhat heroic in that era — and now we're completely reversed."
State and county officials have sued the Trump administration over the three shootings, alleging federal authorities have withheld evidence from them.
Data shows less than a quarter of those arrested during the surge were convicted criminals, and a court filing suggests the operation drained more than $600 million from the Twin Cities' economies.