A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent wanted for shooting a Venezuelan man during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota was arrested on Friday in Texas, authorities said. Christian Castro, 52, was taken into custody 11 days after Minneapolis prosecutors charged him with assault and falsely reporting a crime.
Castro is the second federal agent charged over conduct during “Operation Metro Surge”, the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. He is one of two agents that ICE director Todd Lyons said lied about the non-fatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa Celis. Video evidence released last month contradicted the agents’ accounts.
According to prosecutors, Castro fired through a home’s front door and shot Sosa Celis in the thigh after chasing another man, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, to the apartment where both men lived. Both Sosa Celis and Aljorna were legally residing in the US, said Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty.
Federal authorities initially claimed Sosa Celis struck an ICE officer with a broom handle and that a third man beat the officer with a snow shovel. Surveillance video showed neither man attacked the officer with broomsticks or shovels, no third man was present, and the altercation lasted about 12 seconds, not three minutes. Prosecutors moved to dismiss their own case in February after reviewing the footage.
Moriarty credited the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general and the Texas Rangers with assisting in Castro’s arrest. “Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr Castro,” she said. ICE previously called the charges “unlawful and nothing more than a political stunt”.
