Ex-ICE Agent Charged Over a Shooting Walks Free From a Texas Jail

A former Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with shooting a Venezuelan man and lying about it has been released from a Texas jail, a day after a federal judge refused to order his return to Minnesota.

Christian Castro had been held in a county jail since May over the non-fatal shooting of 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, hit in the leg when Castro fired through the front door of his home during an immigration crackdown in Minnesota on 14 January.

The charge

The sweep was part of the mass deportation effort under President Trump. Prosecutors say Castro wrongfully accused Sosa-Celis and another man of assaulting an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel.

A Minnesota judge issued a nationwide arrest warrant in May. State officials and Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension detained him in Texas on 29 May. He was freed on Thursday morning from the Carrizales-Rucker Cameron County Detention Center near Brownsville, on the Mexican border.

The jurisdictional problem

The mechanics here are the substance. A state has charged a federal officer over conduct during a federal operation, and the officer is in a third state whose authorities have now released him rather than transfer him.

Interstate rendition is normally close to automatic — that is the point of a nationwide warrant. When it is not, the question of whether a state can prosecute a federal agent for actions taken under federal orders stops being theoretical, and Minnesota is left holding a warrant it cannot execute.