Back in January, ICE agent Christian Castro shot Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg through the closed door of a Minneapolis home—which state charging documents say Castro knew was occupied by several people. Castro claimed self-defense, but the government’s account of what actually happened has been unraveling ever since. On top of quashing a civil rights charge against Castro in favor of a lesser false-statements charge, the DOJ fired the prosecutor who objected to that call.
CBS News reports:
A federal prosecutor in Minnesota who was investigating an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer for possible civil rights crimes has been fired. … Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans was investigating ICE officer Christian Castro over the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant earlier this year.
Earlier this week … Evans told attorneys for the man who was shot, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and other victims to prepare for Castro to only be charged with making false statements. … ProPublica quoted directly from an email it said Evans had sent to the attorneys. “This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” the email from Evans reportedly said. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”
The civil rights charge that got quashed existed for a reason. From the same CBS News report:
After Sosa-Celis was shot in the leg, federal prosecutors charged him and one other man—Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna—with forcibly assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers. But the federal government’s description of the leadup to the shooting has shifted, and ICE later accused its agents of lying about the incident.
Initially, the Department of Homeland Security said Sosa-Celis fled a traffic stop on foot, and when an ICE agent tried to arrest him, two other men attacked the agent with a shovel and a broomstick. DHS said Sosa-Celis then broke free and started attacking the agent, too, leading the agent to fire a “defensive shot to defend his life.” …
A month after Aljorna and Sosa-Celis were charged, the Justice Department dropped the case and said “newly discovered evidence” was “materially inconsistent” with the allegations against them. Todd Lyons, who led ICE at the time, said a review of video evidence showed two ICE officers had made “untruthful statements” in sworn testimony.
This creates an absurd situation in which the government admits its own agent lied about what justified the shooting—which is more than enough reason to investigate the shooting itself—while simultaneously punishing the prosecutor who tried to do exactly that.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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