May 18 - Prosecutors in Minnesota have charged a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent with criminal offenses stemming from a January shooting in Minneapolis that took place during a period of intensified federal immigration enforcement in the city. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced that the agent, identified as Christian Castro, 53, faces four felony counts of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon and one misdemeanor count of falsely reporting a crime.
According to Moriarty at a press conference, the charges allege Castro used a dangerous weapon in the incident and provided false information about the event. Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Castro is the second federal agent to face criminal charges from Minneapolis authorities in connection with the enforcement actions that authorities carried out as part of an immigration crackdown under President Donald Trump in the city. The January operations included a shooting that wounded Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg and separate fatal shootings in which two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents.
In February, a senior ICE official said that two federal officers who were involved in the shooting of Sosa-Celis appeared to have lied about the sequence of events that led to that incident. That statement from ICE followed a development in which U.S. prosecutors moved to drop charges against two men who had been accused of assaulting ICE officers connected to the same shooting. In announcing the decision to drop those charges, U.S. prosecutors said the evidence was "materially inconsistent with the allegations."
The new charges against Castro add to a cluster of legal and investigative developments tied to federal immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis earlier this year. Local prosecutors and federal authorities have reached different conclusions at various points in the aftermath, with criminal counts filed against a federal agent and other prosecutions dismissed after prosecutors identified inconsistencies in the underlying evidence.
As the cases proceed, the matters announced by county and federal officials remain subject to legal process and further review. Public statements from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security on the most recent charges were not available at the time of Moriarty's announcement.
Note: This report is based on the charges and official statements presented by Minnesota prosecutors and subsequent public remarks from federal law enforcement officials and prosecutors. It does not include additional commentary or findings beyond those statements.