A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has been federally charged with lying to investigators about the events leading up to his shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant earlier this year in Minneapolis, according to multiple people familiar with the case cited by the Associated Press, CNN and PBS NewsHour. The charges against the officer, Christian Castro, mark the first time the Department of Justice has brought a federal case against an ICE officer for conduct during President Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration enforcement operations.
Castro shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in January 2026 during an enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan national, was legally present in the United States at the time. Castro was suspended from ICE without pay in February 2026 as the case developed.
The newly unsealed federal charge accuses Castro of making false statements to investigators about what happened before he opened fire. Minnesota state prosecutors had already charged Castro separately, with second-degree assault and filing a false police report, after video evidence undercut the account he initially gave of the encounter. Those state charges remain pending.
A Broader Civil Rights Question Still Unresolved
Federal prosecutors have also been weighing whether to bring civil rights charges against Castro over the shooting itself, on top of the false-statements case, according to PBS NewsHour’s reporting on the broader investigation into ICE officers’ conduct in Minneapolis. No decision on additional charges has been announced, and the Justice Department has not said whether it plans to pursue that route.
ICE has said officers who violate their oath will be held accountable. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said earlier this year that “lying under oath is a serious federal offense” and that violations “will not be tolerated,” adding that the agency “remains fully committed to transparency.” Castro was released from a Texas jail in the days before the federal charge was announced, after Minnesota lost a court fight to keep him held.
The case is one of several stemming from ICE’s Minneapolis operations this year. Federal charges against two other Venezuelan men initially accused of assaulting officers during the same period were later dropped after video evidence contradicted the government’s account, and a third man arrested in the operation was never federally charged.
For more on the case, see reporting from PBS NewsHour and the Associated Press.
