ICE Agent Charged With Lying, Not With the Shooting

Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis had made it back through the front door when the shot came through it. The bullet tore through his thigh, continued through a closet, and lodged in the wall of a child's bedroom.⁴¹¹ Four adults and two young children were inside that north Minneapolis duplex that evening.⁴¹¹ He survived, but the path of that round — flesh, closet, nursery wall — is now the undisputed physical center of a case in which almost everything the shooter said about what happened has collapsed.³⁴

The man who fired was Christian Castro, 52, an ICE deportation officer based in the Rio Grande Valley and deployed to Minneapolis for Operation Metro Surge.²⁴ The campaign was a large-scale immigration enforcement operation that began in the Twin Cities in December 2025 with thousands of agents and produced roughly 4,000 arrests.² On January 14, 2026, after a pursuit of Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna to the duplex, Castro shot Aljorna's roommate Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan national, in the thigh.⁴²³ Afterward federal agents used chemical munitions in the neighborhood, bystanders including a family with small children were affected, and protests at the scene lasted for hours.¹²

The federal case unsealed September 4, 2026 charges Castro with six counts of making false statements to FBI investigators, not with the shooting itself.²⁵ The six counts track his account of that night: that he was ambushed by three men who attacked him with a broom and a snow shovel in a struggle lasting about three minutes, that he fired from the ground while tussling, and that he reached for his gun with his right hand while fending off blows with his left.⁴ City traffic-camera video and physical evidence contradicted all of it.³⁴

The visible confrontation lasted about 11 to 12 seconds, not three minutes.³⁴ Sosa-Celis dropped a plastic snow shovel before contact and it was never used as a weapon.⁴ No person struck Castro with a broom as he described, and no persons wielded the broom and snow shovel as he described.³ He was standing when he fired through the closing door, with children inside the house.⁴¹¹ That is the indictment's own language, and it leaves no part of the self-defense story intact.³

Behind the lying charge sits a sharper decision. Career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota had prepared to bring civil-rights charges for the shooting itself — deprivation of rights under color of law, the same statute used in the prosecutions of the officers who killed George Floyd.¹² Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans, who handled the matter, told lawyers for the victims that Main Justice and the U.S. Attorney directed that only false-statements charges proceed.¹² Department leadership blocked the office from bringing the shooting-related civil-rights case rather than letting a grand jury weigh it.¹²

Evans wrote that objection to counsel for Sosa-Celis and the others, and after ProPublica published the email he was fired.¹²¹³ He remains under Justice Department investigation for alleged leaking and, per some reporting, for possible obstruction of a grand jury investigation, with no resolution publicly reported.¹² No independent confirmation of the department's internal reasons for blocking the civil-rights charge is public beyond Evans's own account.¹²

Because Washington declined to charge the shooting, the case that does charge Castro for firing the gun runs through the state.³⁴ Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison at her side, announced on May 18, 2026 four counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of falsely reporting a crime.⁸²² The four assault counts correspond to the four adults just inside the door.⁸ The state's theory is that Castro, standing alone in the front yard and under no physical threat, fired through the closed front door knowing people had just run inside, and that his federal badge conferred no immunity.¹¹²²

That state case remains pending but is effectively stalled.²⁴ Texas Governor Greg Abbott refused to extradite Castro, and a federal judge in Texas declined to compel it, so the strongest case charging him for the shooting is held up while he remains in Texas.¹² ICE and DHS placed Castro and a second officer on administrative leave.⁴ Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said video showed sworn testimony by two officers appears to have made untruthful statements, called lying under oath a serious federal offense, and identified Castro as one of the two.⁴

Castro turned himself in, appeared in federal court in McAllen, Texas on September 4, entered a not-guilty plea, and was released on a $75,000 unsecured bond with a GPS monitor.⁹¹⁶ Prosecutors did not seek to hold him, and he was ordered to appear in Minneapolis on September 18.⁶⁹ The January 14 shooting is one of at least five Metro Surge incidents in which initial official accounts were later contradicted by video, including the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24.²¹ Castro is the first federal immigration officer federally prosecuted for conduct during the surge and the second federal agent charged overall, after Hennepin County earlier charged ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with state assault for pointing a gun at motorists.¹² The government charged Castro for lying and fired the prosecutor who said the shooting itself was a federal crime, and that choice is what the next court dates cannot avoid.¹²¹³