Federal investigators said in court documents unsealed on Tuesday that a man shot and injured by an immigration agent in Minneapolis last week had assaulted that agent before the gun was fired.
A federal complaint and affidavit filed in court by an F.B.I. agent differed in some details from the description provided by the Department of Homeland Security after the shooting last Wednesday. Two men, Alfredo A. Aljorna and Julio C. Sosa-Celis, who are Venezuelan nationals, were accused in the court records of assaulting the agent with a broom before the agent opened fire, striking Mr. Sosa-Celis.
Both men are scheduled to appear in Federal District Court in St. Paul on Wednesday.
The shooting happened a week after another immigration agent shot and killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, on a residential street in a different part of Minneapolis. Both shootings touched off protests in the city, which the Trump administration has flooded with immigration agents in recent weeks.
The newly unsealed court records provided the government’s fullest account yet of the second shooting, which an F.B.I. agent said happened after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on a temporary assignment in the state ran a license plate on a Ford Focus and found that its Minnesota tag was registered to someone in the country illegally.
The two ICE agents believed that the driver, Mr. Aljorna, was the person who owned the vehicle, the F.B.I. agent wrote, but that turned out not to be the case. The affidavit said that the ICE agents, driving an unmarked vehicle, turned on their lights and siren to pull over the Ford. The F.B.I. agent said that Mr. Aljorna instead sped off and “recklessly zig-zagged through traffic” in a chase that lasted between 15 and 20 minutes.
The affidavit noted that the ICE agents “were not familiar with the area,” and said that they eventually lost track of Mr. Aljorna until discovering that he had crashed into a light pole. The agents said they then saw Mr. Aljorna run toward a nearby apartment building, and that one of the ICE agents chased after him. Another person, identified in the affidavit as Mr. Sosa-Celis, was standing on the porch and urged Mr. Aljorna to run faster, officials said.
The F.B.I. agent wrote that Mr. Aljorna eventually fell, and an agent caught up to him. The two then fought on the ground, the affidavit said, before Mr. Sosa-Celis grabbed a broomstick and started hitting the agent in the face. The affidavit said that the agent thought he saw another man, who was not named, approach holding a snow shovel, and that the agent was also struck with the shovel.
Mr. Aljorna eventually freed himself from the agent, the affidavit said, and grabbed the broom. The ICE agent, the affidavit said, was “exhausted, alone, on the ground and in fear.” The agent sustained a gash on his hand while deflecting a blow, the F.B.I. agent wrote.
The ICE agent drew his pistol and fired one round, the affidavit said, and was initially unsure if anyone had been hit. The two men had started to run toward the apartment building “simultaneously” when the agent fired, the affidavit said.
The two men went inside the building. After more law enforcement officers arrived, the affidavit said, they used tear gas and the men surrendered. Mr. Sosa-Celis was found to have “a non-life-threatening gunshot wound to his upper right thigh,” according to the affidavit.
Katherian Roe, the federal defender in Minnesota, who is listed in court records as the lawyer for both men, indicated in an email that she is often initially listed as the lawyer of record in cases that will later be assigned to another lawyer. She did not comment on the circumstances of this case.
The account of the incident relayed by the F.B.I. agent largely matched what federal officials said in the immediate aftermath, as protesters were gathering at the scene and clashing with law enforcement. But it also included notable differences from that initial description and from a more detailed statement released by the Department of Homeland Security the following day.
In earlier descriptions, federal officials said that the incident started with “a targeted traffic stop in Minneapolis of an illegal alien from Venezuela,” but did not mention that the driver the agents were trying to stop was not who they first believed him to be. Officials have said that Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis are both from Venezuela and are both in the country illegally.
In its more detailed statement on the day after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security indicated that Mr. Sosa-Celis, not Mr. Aljorna, was the driver. The agency also used a different spelling of Mr. Aljorna’s last name. That statement accused a third man, also from Venezuela and also in the country illegally, of being involved in the incident. While the affidavit says that the agent believed a third man assaulted him with a shovel, only Mr. Aljorna and Mr. Sosa-Celis are accused by name in the complaint.
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to an email on Tuesday night asking about those differences.
The F.B.I. agent’s affidavit said that investigators found a broom and snow shovel outside the apartment building. The affidavit also said that law enforcement officials decided to leave that building “without executing a full search warrant” because of “unprecedented civil unrest that developed in the vicinity.”
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
The post In Court Record, Official Describes Assault Before ICE Agent Shot Man in Minneapolis appeared first on New York Times.
