You can't hide your lying ICE: The shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis

A Minneapolis prosecutor charges an ICE agent, exposing how DHS shamelessly lied after its officers shot an immigrant, tear gassed two kids, and put a bullet in the wall of a child's bedroom.

(Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about how the Trump administration has brazenly lied about abuse by immigration officers. You can find links to previous posts below.)

This week Hennepin County Prosecutor Mary Moriarty announced that she has filed criminal charges against Christian Castro, the ICE agent who blindly fired into the closed front door of a home, wounding a Venezuelan immigrant named Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. The shooting took place in Minneapolis, two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good. After the Sosa-Celis incident, the DHS propaganda machine run by then-chief spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin went to work. Overnight, headlines around the country declared that Sosa-Celis and two other men had ambushed and beat two ICE officers nearly to death, giving them no choice but to use lethal force to defend themselves.

It was all a lie.

Let’s start with a summary of the DHS account of the incident, which is still posted on the agency’s website:

On the night of January 14, Castro and another ICE officer pulled over Sosa-Celis, who is undocumented, as part of a “targeted operation.” In other words, they were specifically seeking him out. We’re already in the general vicinity of bullshit here, because they also claimed that they pulled him over because his license plate matched a car registered to the man they were seeking. These two things are incongruent. If you’re on a targeted operation seeking a specific person, it isn’t clear why you’d need to run his plate. But as we’ll see, they were making it all up as they went along.

DHS claims that, after pulling him over, the agents identified Sosa-Celis on sight as the undocumented man they were targeting. According to the agents, Sosa-Celis then fled the stop and led them on a chase before crashing into a parked car and fleeing on foot. They pursued him on foot to a residence, where he and two other Venezuelan men began attacking the ICE officers with “the handles of brooms and shovels,” according to DHS. The three Venezuelan men then beat the agents for more than three minutes, leaving one officer “fighting for his life.” Only then, DHS claimed, did Castro fire his weapon, striking Sosa-Celis in the leg.

All three men then ran into the home. Other officers arrived, flushed them out of the house with tear gas, and arrested them.

This is how DHS still characterizes the incident on its website:

This attack on another brave member of law enforcement took place while Minnesota’s top leaders, Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, continue to refuse cooperation with federal efforts to arrest and remove violent criminal illegal aliens from their communities.

The hateful rhetoric and resistance against men and women who are simply trying to do their jobs must end. Federal law enforcement officers are facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest criminals and lawbreakers.

All three of the illegal aliens involved in this violent attack on law enforcement were let into our country by the Biden administration.

And here’s what DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said about the incident:

“What we saw last night in Minneapolis was an attempted murder of federal law enforcement. Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms. Fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot. Mayor Frey and Governor Walz have to get their city under control. They are encouraging impeding and assault against our law enforcement which is a federal crime, a felony. This is putting the people of Minnesota in harm’s way."

Surveillance video and investigations by Moriarty’s office, local, and national media and have since shown this entire narrative to be a lie. In fact, even the affidavit filed by the FBI agent who investigated the incident — in which he supports the charges against the Venezuelan men — also contradicts Castro and his fellow agent.

So here’s what actually happened:

At around 6pm, Castro and another ICE officer, both of whom had recently been assigned to Minneapolis and didn’t know the city, started running random license plates they saw on the street through a DHS database. One of the plates they ran was registered to an undocumented immigrant named Joffre Barrera. So they pulled the car over.

The driver of that car was not Barrera. It also wasn’t Sosa-Celis. It was Alfredo A. Aljorna, who lived with Sosa-Celis, and was out making food deliveries. Aljorna told the agents he had recently bought the car on Facebook Marketplace. This didn’t seem to matter to them.

We know from subsequent reports and lawsuits that Trump’s deportation forces were (and still are) pulling over anyone who looks vaguely Asian, Black, or Latino and demanding they prove their citizenship or legal residence. We also know that DHS has lied about “targeted enforcement” after other high-profile incidents. They apparently understand that the public doesn’t like federal immigration cops terrorizing people for no good reason. If they can claim they were specifically targeting a really bad guy when things went wrong, the public tends to be more forgiving. So they just started lying about the records of the people they claimed to be targeting.

After the murder of Alex Pretti, for example, DHS also claimed those officers were part of a targeted operation seeking out a “dangerous criminal” with a “significant criminal history.” The guy they were seeking had traffic violations, along with one misdemeanor conviction that had been expunged from his record. In this case, even Barrera had only immigration-related violations.

Aljorna, who is undocumented but also has no criminal record other than immigration charges, fled the traffic stop in the car, struck a utility pole, and then fled on foot to the home where he and Sosa-Celis lived with their families.

Sosa-Celis, meanwhile, was shoveling show in front of the house. According to an FBI affidavit, Aljorna had called him as he was fleeing the ICE agents to tell him they were trying to pull him over. When Sosa-Celi saw Aljorna running toward him with ICE officers in pursuit, he immediately dropped the shovel and ran toward the house. You can see this in the surveillance video above.

As Aljorna fled into the front yard, he slipped and fell. The ICE officers jumped on top of him. Sosa-Celis briefly came out of the house to try to pull the officers off of Aljorna and help him up. After a brief struggle, Aljorna was able to free himself. Both men then ran into the house and shut and locked the door.

At one point, Aljorna did throw a broom at the officers, hoping to obstruct them long enough for them to get inside. The broom didn’t hit either officer.

It was only after both men fled into the house that Castro took out his gun and fired it. His bullet penetrated the front door, struck Sosa-Celis in the thigh, passed through his leg, and lodged in the wall of a child’s bedroom. More federal agents and a tactical team eventually showed up and started tear gassing the residence. There were two children inside. The men surrendered.

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So let’s count the lies this administration told about this incident:

Lie #1:

DHS claimed that this was a targeted operation and that Sosa-Celis was their intended target all along. The affidavit by the FBI agent who investigated this incident — which is otherwise overly deferential to the officers — makes clear that this is a lie. Castro and the other agent were randomly running license plates through the DHS database in search of undocumented people.

Lie #2:

DHS claimed that Sosa-Celis, the man they shot, was the man driving the car, the one who fled the stop and crashed into a parked car. This is important because it makes it look as if the dangerous criminal they were seeking was ultimately the man they shot. But Sosa-Celis wasn’t the man they were targeting, he wasn’t driving the car they pulled over, and he wasn’t in the car at all. He was at home shoveling snow.

Lie #3:

ICE and DHS claimed the agents were able to identify the driver on sight as the man they were looking for. Again, they weren’t targeting any specific person. But also, Aljorna, the actual driver, is nine years younger, five inches taller, and 50 pounds heavier than Barrera, the man to whom the car was registered, and who was a hit in the DHS database.

Lie #4:

DHS claimed that when they got to the driver’s home, Sosa-Celis, Aljorna and a third man, Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez Ledezma, ambushed the ICE officers, and then severely beat them with shovels and broom handles. They called the beating an “attempted murder.” Castro told an FBI investigator that he “felt the broom handle hit his face,” that he “felt pain as he was being struck with the broom stick,” and that before firing he was “exhausted, alone, on the ground, and in fear of his safety.”

Surveillance video shows that Sosa-Celis clearly dropped the plastic snow shovel when he saw the men running toward him. At worst, someone may have thrown a broom at the officers. It missed. There was no ambush. There was no beating.

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Lie #5:

DHS claimed the three Venezuelan men beat the ICE officers for three minutes. The altercation with Aljorna lasted about 9 seconds, during which he did not beat them, but tried to free himself from them. Sosa-Celis assisted Aljorna for about three seconds. The entire encounter, from the time Aljorna exited the car to the time Castro fired into the house took about 30 seconds.

Lie #6:

DHS claimed that the third man, Hernandez Ledezma, participated in the ambush and beating. Even the FBI affidavit, filed two days after the incident, makes clear that he had nothing to do with it. He never left his apartment. But he did witness the whole thing. He, too, was disparaged in the national press. His photo and name were published by DHS. He was also arrested and sent to a deportation facility in Texas.

Hernandez Ledezma’s attorneys have alleged that he was sent to Texas to keep him from testifying about what he saw. A federal judge ordered his return and then ordered his release. He appears to have been released around February 17.

Lie #7:

DHS claimed that Castro was under attack when he fired his gun, and that he fired “defensively.” Castro was standing in front of the house when he fired, and all three of the alleged “assailants” were inside, after running away from him.

Lie #8:

DHS claimed the alleged assault on the ICE officers was part of a “1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest criminals and lawbreakers.”

We’ve addressed these bogus statistics before. They’re garbage. It isn’t clear what baseline they’re using. They don’t match up with the number of people charged in court (and even when assault charges are actually filed, they’ve rarely held up). And, as this case demonstrates, DHS has been caught lying about assaults on immigration officers — over, and over, and over again.

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It’s important to remember what was going on when this confrontation happened. Renee Good had just been killed. Public sentiment was souring on the campaign in Minnesota. The administration badly needed something to legitimize its occupation of the Twin Cities.

It was in this period — the weeks between the killing of Good and the killing of Pretti — that Stephen Miller instructed ICE and Border Patrol to “force confrontations” in order to “win the PR battle.” He added, “If we let them have the perception that their protesting is successful, then the administration will never successfully prosecute interior operations to remove aliens. So we need to engage these protesters, and we need to vanquish them by force of arms. They need to be vanquished by any force necessary.”

So here was a gift-wrapped narrative that both celebrated the heroism of an immigration officer and illustrated the alleged threat officers face from violent undocumented immigrants.

It was all bullshit. But it was still amplified all over right-wing media.

Even after media reports about the surveillance video that clearly showed that ICE and DHS had lied, and even after the DOJ also admitted the officers had lied, some right-wing outlets continued to defend the officers. The Federalist, for example, decided that the real villain in this story . . . was the New York Times.

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I can’t say if DHS higher-ups were aware that the ICE officers were lying. What is clear is that they didn’t care enough to check. Two days after the incident, the Minnesota Reformer posted audio from a 911 call in which a neighbor explicitly told the dispatcher that the ICE officer fired as the men closed the door to the home.

The affidavit from the investigating FBI officer should have been another red flag. When applying the slightest bit of obligatory scrutiny, the officer found that Castro and the other agent had lied about who was driving the car. He also concludeed that Hernandez Ledezma likely didn’t participate in the scuffle, as DHS publicly claimed.

But the FBI agent then took the other claims from Castro and his fellow agent at face value. He claimed, for example, that the surveillance video either verified Castro’s account or is too dark and grainy to be of much use. He understated how much of the incident was captured in the video, conveniently leaving out the portion that directly contradicted Castro. He also said that FBI investigators were unable to find shell casings or evidence that Castro’s bullet had struck the house. There was a shell casing right outside the house and a bullet hole in the front door.

Federal prosecutors also had access to the surveillance video within hours of the shooting. It took them weeks to get around to watching it. Instead, they charged Aljorna and Sosa-Celis with felonies as the administration disparaged them in the national media.

Once they did watch the video, even Trump’s DOJ realized that these charges wouldn’t hold up in court. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen moved to have them dismissed with prejudice. The DOJ also said it was opening an internal criminal investigation.

That was in early February. It’s now late May. And this of course is the same administration that has repeatedly told federal immigration officers that they have “immunity” from any form of accountability, and that declared 16 shootings by federal officers to be “justified” before bothering with an investigation.

I suspect this is why Moriarty isn’t waiting. Castro is now the second federal officer she has charged under state law. Last month, she charged ICE agent Gregory Donnell Morgan, Jr. with aggravated assault for pointing a gun at motorists.

It’s an open question whether these attempts will hold up in court. The Trump administration has already denounced Moriarty’s decision, and they’ve made clear that they plan to fight any attempt to hold Trump’s deportation army accountable at the state and local level.

But kudos to Moriarty for trying, especially given that this administration has already targeted her office with politically-motivated investigations. There needs to be consequences for this sort of abuse of power. Had she not brought the charges, we wouldn’t have seen this additional round of coverage. Most people would only know that the charges had been dropped. The extent of the administration’s lies would largely be lost. I doubt it will change many minds among hardcore MAGA people, but it’s important to establish a public record.

Finally, a word about DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin — the flak who coordinated, oversaw, and disseminated the lies about Sosa-Celis, Alex Pretti, Renee Good, and dozens of other people. She ought to be shamed out of polite society. She lied as effortlessly as she breathed, saturating the media landscape with wildly exaggerated falsehoods, over and over again. She spread bigoted, demonstrably false tropes about immigrants. She cruelly disparaged the memory of two decent people who were trying to stand up for their neighbors, as well as the memories of several immigrants unjustly killed by immigration cops, all while collecting checks from taxpayers, and while a firm run by her husband won a corrupt no-bid contract to produce yet more propaganda that spread yet more lies.

In a just world, there would be consequences for all of that. In a just world, McLaughlin’s career in politics, media, and communications would be over.

Instead, she appears to be auditioning for a career as a cable news pundit.

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Previous installments of “You can’t hide your lying ICE”:

• The harassment of Francisco Longoria

• The illegal raid on ChongLy Scott Thao

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