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Minnesota prosecutors charged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Christian J. Castro, 52, on Monday with assault in the Jan. 14 shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis in north Minneapolis.
The ICE agent, who was identified for the first time publicly on Monday, faces four counts of second-degree assault as well as one count of falsely reporting a crime.
The latter charge comes from Castro’s earlier accusation that Sosa-Celis and the subject of the agents’ car chase, Alfredo Aljorna, both Venezuelan immigrants here legally according to state prosecutors, had assaulted him with a broom and a snow shovel before Castro opened fire.
The Justice Department dropped its assault charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna after federal prosecutors belatedly watched surveillance camera footage that contradicted the accounts of Castro and a second ICE agent; in a rare move, the ICE acting director said that the agents appeared to have made “false statements.”
“A violent crime did occur that night, but it was Mr. Castro who committed it. He shot through the door of a home with many people, including children, inside while fortunately missing several others,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a Monday press conference.
Moriarty’s office has issued a nationwide warrant for Castro’s arrest. Moriarty said that they don’t know where Castro is, but there are “mechanisms out there to find him.” She added that she feels “pretty confident that we will get him in here to start this process.”
The case is currently in state court, though Moriarty said that her office expects Castro’s defense to try to move the case to federal court, after which he can assert immunity under what’s known as the Supremacy Clause, which protects federal agents for reasonably carrying out their duties. If Castro were convicted, she noted, he would be ineligible for a presidential pardon.
Both Moriarty and Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is partnering with the county, emphasized that “there’s no such thing as complete immunity.” Ellison also noted that there’s a “long line of cases” where state prosecutors have charged federal agents for breaking state law, a practice which stretches back to the 1800s and has gotten mixed results.
Castro was identified mainly through the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Moriarty said, whose investigators got to the scene on Jan. 14 and heard FBI agents identify him. She added that her office got no cooperation from the federal government to give any evidence.
In Castro’s original statement to the FBI, he claimed that Sosa-Celis and Aljorna repeatedly struck him with a broom and a snow shovel; he said he then drew his gun and “simultaneously fired” a round as they were running toward their home. Sosa-Celis and Aljorna have maintained that they never attacked Castro, and furthermore that Castro shot Sosa-Celis in the leg through the front door.
The arrest warrant filed by prosecutors, which is based on an investigation by the BCA and cites the surveillance camera footage, aligns with Sosa-Celis and Aljorna’s accounts that Castro fired at the front door of the house. It includes a description of holes from the bullet’s trajectory through the front door, a foyer wall, a closet and the wall of a child’s bedroom.
The shooting was the second of three injurious shootings in Minneapolis during the federal immigration surge this winter, occurring between the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The Jan. 14 case, which drew over 100 protestors to the scene, was initially shrouded in mystery compared to the other two shootings, since there was no video evidence of the altercation that led to the shooting before the city of Minneapolis released its surveillance camera footage in April. The federal government has corrected its own account multiple times, including its initial press release which incorrectly identified Sosa-Celis as the driver of the car and a subject of a “targeted traffic stop.” It turned out that the ICE agents had mistaken Aljorna, who was driving the car, for another Latino man wholly uninvolved in the incident, and that Sosa-Celis, Aljorna’s roommate, wasn’t involved in the car chase at all, according to an affidavit that accompanied the DOJ’s charges.
Aljorna and Sosa-Celis were both detained for weeks after the shooting, and then re-detained by ICE after a judge ordered them to be released. Their partners were both detained and transported to Texas in January. They have all since been released from detention and were temporarily barred from deportation during the case against them, the Star Tribune reported.
The charges come a month after Minnesota prosecutors filed its first charges against an ICE officer for allegedly brandishing his service weapon at two people in what prosecutors said appeared to be a road rage incident. Gregory Donnell Morgan, Jr., the ICE agent, is still not in custody, though Moriarty said they have made “substantial progress” in getting Morgan to state court.
Moriarty said her office is still working on the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti, and that she doesn’t have a clear timeline for when they will feel confident enough to make a decision to charge or not charge the federal agents who killed the two U.S. citizens. As in the Jan. 14 shooting, local investigations into the killings of Good and Pretti have been significantly hindered by the federal government’s lack of cooperation, including denying local investigators access to evidence. In March, Minnesota prosecutors filed a lawsuit for evidence from the federal government on the two fatal shootings and the Jan. 14 shooting.
by Alyssa Chen, Minnesota Reformer
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: [email protected].
