ICE agent arrested over shooting of Venezuelan man in Minnesota | Minnesota

A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent wanted for shooting a Venezuelan man during the sweeping immigration crackdown in Minnesota was arrested on Friday in Texas, authorities said.

Christian Castro was taken into custody 11 days after Minneapolis prosecutors charged him with assault and falsely reporting a crime.

Castro is the second federal agent to be charged over their conduct during the Minnesota crackdown, which was known as “Operation Metro Surge”. He is one of two agents that ICE’s director, Todd Lyons, said lied about the circumstances surrounding the non-fatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa Celis. Video evidence of the incident, released last month, has cast further doubt on the ICE agents’ stories.

The arrests at the behest of local prosecutors mark a rare instance of accountability for ICE, an agency whose officers became notorious last year for high-profile shootings, concealing their identities with masks and severely injuring protesters with less-lethal munitions.

Hennepin county prosecutors in Minnesota said the state’s bureau of criminal apprehension located Castro, 52, in Texas and worked with agents from the inspector general’s office of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Texas Rangers to arrest him.

“Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr Castro,” the Hennepin county attorney, Mary Moriarty, said.

According to prosecutors, Castro fired through a home’s front door and shot Sosa Celis in the thigh after Castro and another officer chased a different man, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, to the Minneapolis apartment duplex where he and Sosa Celis lived. Sosa Celis and Aljorna were legally residing in the US, Moriarty said.

Federal authorities initially accused Sosa Celis of repeatedly striking an ICE officer in the face with a broom handle, and said that a third, unidentified man also beat the officer with a snow shovel in an altercation that lasted about three minutes. Sosa Celis countered that he never struck the officer, though his friend Aljorna may have during a brief scuffle.

Surveillance video released by the city of Minneapolis in April, however, clearly contradicted the ICE officers’ stories. Neither Sosa Celis nor Aljorna batter the officer with broomsticks and shovels. There was no third man. The altercation lasted approximately 12 seconds, rather than three minutes.

Prosecutors took the unusual step of moving to dismiss their own case in February after reviewing the footage. The justice department opened an investigation into whether the officers lied about what happened.

In a statement after the charges were announced, ICE said the US attorney’s office was investigating statements made by officers, who could face disciplinary action including being fired and prosecuted.

ICE called the Hennepin county attorney’s action “unlawful and nothing more than a political stunt”. The DHS’s inspector general’s office, which Moriarty credited with assisting in the arrest, is separate from ICE and is meant to serve as a watchdog for DHS agencies, including ICE.

The Trump administration sent thousands of officers to the Minneapolis and Saint Paul area as part of Donald Trump’s national deportation campaign.

Tensions mounted during the weeks-long campaign in the Twin Cities, and the shooting deaths of US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers sparked mass unrest and raised questions about officers’ conduct. Videos in those cases also cast serious doubt on ICE’s portrayal of its officers’ shootings as acts of self-defense.

Minnesota leaders and the Trump administration have clashed over who has the authority to investigate and prosecute federal officers for on-duty conduct.

Moriarty’s office last month charged immigration agent Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr with assault for allegedly pointing his gun at people in a car on a highway. He turned himself in last week and his lawyer disputes the charges.

The county is also investigating Good’s and Pretti’s killings and sued the Trump administration in March to gain access to evidence in those cases and the Sosa Celis shooting.

Online court records do not list an attorney for Castro and it wasn’t immediately clear if he has one, according to the Associated Press.

The Associated Press contributed reporting