Christian Castro, 52, faces six counts of making false statements to investigators, according to an indictment unsealed Friday.
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A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with lying about the shooting of a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis earlier this year appeared in federal court on Friday for the first time since his indictment.
A U.S. magistrate judge in McAllen, Texas, is expected to rule later Friday on whether Christian Castro, 52, should be detained and transferred by federal authorities to Minnesota, or released on bail and allowed to report to a court in that state later.
Prosecutors told the court they would not seek to hold Castro in custody until trial.
Castro faces six federal counts of lying to investigators probing the Jan. 14 shooting of Venezuelan migrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, one of several high-profile shooting incidents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that roiled the Minneapolis community.
The federal case against Castro is the first known instance of the Justice Department seeking to prosecute an immigration officer for actions taken during the ICE enforcement surge in Minnesota earlier this year — a campaign that sparked national outrage, weeks of protests and condemnations from federal judges.
Castro’s attorneys, Rolando Cantu and David Lindenmuth, did not immediately respond to requests for comment after the brief court appearance Friday.
The agent surrendered to federal authorities Thursday night, a week after he had been released from a Texas jail amid an ongoing legal battle over whether he should be extradited to Minnesota to face state charges stemming from the same incident.
Typically stationed in ICE’s Harlingen, Texas, field office, Castro was temporarily deployed to Minnesota along with thousands of other agents from across the country as part of the crackdown. It was during those efforts that his run-in with Sosa-Celis occurred.
Castro was hired by ICE in September 2025 after eight years as a Border Patrol agent, according to court records released Friday.
He joined the agency amid a broad push to hire hundreds of new agents in support of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts — a campaign that has prompted questions from critics over whether the rapid hiring surge allowed for job candidates to be properly vetted.
Authorities have said Castro was pursuing a suspected undocumented immigrant who fled into a duplex where Sosa-Celis was living. The agent then fired through the door of the house, striking Sosa-Celis in the leg.
Initially, federal prosecutors charged Sosa-Celis and another man with attacking Castro, based largely on an account provided by the agent, who claimed he fired in self-defense after Sosa-Celis and others attacked him with a snow shovel and a broom handle.
But weeks after those charges were filed, prosecutors withdrew them, telling a federal judge in Minneapolis that a review of video evidence from the scene raised doubts that the assault Castro described had occurred.
The federal indictment against Castro unsealed Friday identifies six false statements that prosecutors accuse him of making during that investigation, including a claim that he fired the shot from the ground while struggling with Sosa-Celis and others at the scene. The indictment also cast doubt on his claims that he had reached for his gun with his right hand while defending himself from blows with his left.
“No person struck Castro with a broom as he described,” it said, “and no persons wielded the broom and snow shovel as he described.”
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The copy of the indictment, included as part of the court record in McAllen, is not dated and does not bear the signature of any prosecutor or Justice Department official.
The question of what charges Castro should face sparked weeks of intense debate within the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis. Several prosecutors there believed Castro should have been charged with violating Sosa-Celis’s civil rights, under a statute that could carry a prison sentence of up to a decade, according to people familiar with those deliberations.
Instead, the Justice Department opted to pursue a lesser charge of lying to investigators, with a maximum sentence of five years. That prompted discord between U.S. prosecutors in Minneapolis and higher-ups at the Justice Department in Washington, multiple people familiar with those conflicts said.
The Washington Post has reported that one of the lead prosecutors assigned to the investigation, Matt Evans, was fired this week after expressing his frustration with that charging decision in an email to attorneys for Sosa-Celis and others earlier this week.
Top Justice Department officials are now weighing whether to charge Evans with obstruction of justice for allegedly leaking information about the status of the case, two people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing deliberations.
Complicating Castro’s case is the fact that he faces both federal and state charges.
In May, Minnesota state prosecutors charged Castro — who has been suspended by ICE and was back at home in Texas — with assaulting Sosa-Celis with a deadly weapon.
However, Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, refused to immediately extradite Castro to Minnesota to stand trial, saying he was not sure that Castro qualified as a fugitive under the law.
Minnesota authorities have called that a smoke screen and accused Abbott, who is running for reelection this fall, of delaying the extradition to Minneapolis, a deeply blue city, for political reasons.
The conflict prompted a court battle that ended last week with a federal judge casting doubt on the idea that Abbott had legal grounds to deny the extradition, but refusing for now to intervene, since the governor was saying he had not made a final decision on Minnesota’s request.
The federal charges filed against Castro this week will probably render moot the dispute between Minnesota and Texas over the extradition.
However, state and federal prosecutors in Minnesota still must decide which of their two cases against Castro will proceed first.
Mary Moriarty — the top prosecutor in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis — suggested in an interview Thursday that given the unusual circumstances leading up to the Justice Department’s decision to indict Castro, notably the battle over how to charge him, she believed the agent should face trial on the state’s case first.
“The level of trust right now in the federal government is just not there,” Moriarty said. “I think it’s appropriate for us to go first, because people have much more trust in our office to be seeking justice right now.”
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