He Said Three Men Attacked Him With a Broom and a Snow Shovel. Surveillance Video Told a Different Story.

On January 14, ICE deportation officer Christian Castro and his partner tried to stop a vehicle in north Minneapolis. The driver ran. Castro and his partner tackled him in the front yard of a duplex. A resident, 24-year-old Julio Sosa-Celis, came outside to help during what investigators say was an 11-second struggle. As the two men ran back inside and began closing the door behind them, Castro stood up, drew his service weapon, and fired a single round through it. The bullet hit Sosa-Celis in the leg and lodged in a wall of the apartment downstairs — where, according to court filings, two children were present at the time.

Days after the shooting, according to the federal indictment unsealed this week, Castro told an FBI agent a different version of events: that he was on his back, that he'd been assaulted by multiple people, and that two of them wielded a broom and a snow shovel against him. He said the physical struggle lasted approximately three minutes.

Federal prosecutors say surveillance video contradicts nearly every detail. The indictment states no person struck Castro with a broom as he described, and no one wielded a broom or snow shovel against him at all. The actual physical struggle, according to investigators, lasted roughly 11 seconds — not three minutes. Based on that footage, prosecutors later dropped the assault charges Sosa-Celis and a second resident had been facing, which had been built on Castro's account of what happened.

A federal grand jury indicted Castro, 52, on six counts of making false statements to investigators — one for each specific lie prosecutors say he told. Separately, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has charged Castro at the state level with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. Castro turned himself in and pleaded not guilty in federal court in McAllen, Texas, and was released on a $75,000 unsecured bond with a GPS monitor.

The false-statements charges Castro is actually facing may not be the full story prosecutors wanted to bring. Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans, who led the investigation, was fired the same week the indictment became public — after ProPublica published a letter in which Evans said he believed the evidence supported a far more serious charge: "deprivation of rights under color of law," a federal civil rights offense. Evans claimed U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen and DOJ headquarters overruled him and insisted on the lesser false-statements charges instead. The Justice Department disputes Evans's account and says it is investigating whether he broke the law himself, in how he handled the case — while maintaining that the civil rights investigation into Castro remains open and additional charges haven't been ruled out.

Strip away the procedural detail and the case sits at the center of two collisions at once: the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement push in Minneapolis, and the question of what accountability looks like when a federal agent's own account of a shooting doesn't survive contact with the security footage. Castro has not been convicted of anything — he is presumed innocent, and his attorney is asking the public to withhold judgment. But the fact that a career federal prosecutor was removed from the case after pushing for tougher charges, in a case the DOJ itself now says remains under civil-rights review, means this indictment is very likely not the last chapter.