WASHINGTON — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent suspended for shooting a Venezuelan man in Minnesota in January and later lying about the incident was charged by the Justice Department on Thursday for making false statements to investigators, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The person was not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. The person said 52-year-old Christian Castro, the officer who authorities say shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in January, has been charged with making false statements to federal investigators.<\/p>\n
SEE ALSO: ICE officer released after extradition rejected suspended without pay, DHS says<\/a><\/p>\n The federal charges, which remain under seal, follow Castro’s release from jail last week after Texas\u2019 governor\u00a0refused to immediately sign an extradition warrant<\/a>\u00a0to hand him over to Minnesota authorities, who have charged him separately with assault and false reporting of a crime related to the same shooting.<\/p>\n Federal authorities had\u00a0initially accused<\/a>\u00a0Sosa-Celis and another man of beating an officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel during the confrontation. But federal prosecutors dropped charges against the men after video evidence showed the officers may have lied about the encounter, and officials opened an investigation.<\/p>\n Earlier this week, a federal prosecutor working on the case told lawyers for Sosa-Celis and other victims that Justice Department officials blocked the prosecutor\u2019s push to bring a more serious civil rights charge against the officer for the shooting,\u00a0ProPublica reported.<\/a><\/p>\n But a person familiar with the investigation disputed the prosecutor\u2019s characterization, saying the civil rights probe is ongoing and that there has been no final decision on whether to bring additional charges. The prosecutor, Matthew Evans, was fired on Thursday and is now under investigation for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe, the person said.<\/p>\n Castro was initially arrested in May in the Minnesota case and held in custody in Brownsville, Texas, a city bordering Mexico, while Minnesota officials sought his extradition. But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to immediately sign off, citing continuing\u00a0investigations of fraud<\/a>\u00a0in government social service programs in Minnesota, which Trump used to justify his\u00a0immigration crackdown<\/a>\u00a0there.<\/p>\n Minnesota officials had sought to stop the sheriff in Cameron County, Texas, from releasing Castro, out of fear that he would flee to Mexico. According to a lawsuit filed by Minnesota, Castro had a conversation with a woman while he was incarcerated, in which he spoke about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico after his release.<\/p>\n But Castro was released a week ago after a federal judge refused to order Texas to extradite him.<\/p>\n The Department of Homeland Security previously called Minnesota\u2019s prosecution of Castro \u201cunlawful and nothing more than a political stunt,\u201d saying only federal authorities have jurisdiction in the case.<\/p>\n Castro was suspended from ICE without pay in February while federal authorities conducted the investigation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe men and women of ICE are entrusted with upholding the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and ethical conduct,\u201d ICE’s acting director at the time, Todd Lyons, said then. \u201cViolations of this sacred sworn oath will not be tolerated. ICE remains fully committed to transparency, accountability, and the fair enforcement of our nation\u2019s immigration laws.\u201d<\/p>\n Minnesota officials alleged that Castro fired through the front door of a home and shot Sosa-Celis in the thigh.<\/p>\n Castro and another officer had chased a different man, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, to the Minneapolis apartment duplex where he and Sosa-Celis lived. Minnesota prosecutors said the officer then falsely accused Sosa-Celis and another man of attacking an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel.<\/p>\n Attorneys for Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, who Minnesota officials have said were legally in the U.S., didn\u2019t immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press on Thursday.<\/p>\n ABC News was not immediately able to reach Evans for comment Thursday and received an auto-reply from his office email stating he was now “on leave.”\u00a0<\/p>\n ABC News contributed to this report.<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 2026 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent suspended for shooting a Venezuelan man in Minnesota in January…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":835304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[353637,4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":["post-835303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-353637","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=835303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/835303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/835304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=835303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=835303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=835303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}