In the 17 days between the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, another violent incident took place in Minneapolis that received far less attention. An ICE agent allegedly fired a shot into a home, wounding a fleeing man in the leg; the bullet lodged near a child’s playpen inside the house. That shooting is now the subject of a legal dispute between Minnesota and Texas that calls into question one of the most basic premises of the Constitution: that states will engage with one another in good faith for the perpetuation of the union.
In May, officials in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, filed criminal charges in state court against the ICE agent, Christian Castro. But Castro had left Minnesota for Texas, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott was refusing to return him. Last week, Castro walked free from a Texas jail after a federal judge declined to force the extradition.
“Even though we are separate states, we also function as the United States” because of reliable collaboration between state governments, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told me. But now, she worries, “somebody can commit a crime in one state and flee to another state, and depending on what the political views or whims are of the governor in that state, that person may not go back to face those charges. How can that be a standard that we can live with?”
Minnesota’s case against Castro was never going to be easy. Immediately after the shooting, Castro claimed that the men he was chasing, Julio Sosa-Celis and Alfredo Aljorna, had attacked him with a shovel and broom in a prolonged struggle before Castro fired and wounded Sosa-Celis. The Justice Department brought charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna over the assault—only to drop the case a month later, shortly before ICE and DOJ began investigating whether Castro lied about having been attacked. Castro and his ICE partner were suspended and placed under investigation by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which handles officer misconduct, and by the Justice Department. Moriarty later announced state charges against Castro over the shooting and his alleged lying to law enforcement. (Castro has not made any public statements regarding the case and has not entered a plea.)
The decision to indict Castro queued up a lengthy and potentially risky legal fight over a state’s ability to bring criminal charges against a federal officer. (Hennepin County is currently engaged in a similar skirmish in a different case against an ICE agent who was charged in state court over a road-rage incident.) But Castro’s voyage from Minnesota to Texas complicated matters further: Shortly after the shooting, new court filings reveal, ICE ordered Castro to return from his detail in Minneapolis to his usual posting in the Rio Grande Valley. This meant that Minnesota officials would need the cooperation of Texas authorities in order to ensure Castro’s return to Hennepin County to stand trial—if, that is, Castro refused to return voluntarily to Minnesota. And, it turned out, he did.
[Read: ICE has quietly changed its deadly-force rule]
Typically, an interstate extradition is not very interesting. “There are tens of thousands of extraditions that are carried out each year without any incident whatsoever,” Ethan Lowens, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania law school, told me. If a person commits a crime in State A and then travels to State B, Governor B must—by law—respect Governor A’s request to return the defendant to State A for prosecution. This duty traces back to the extradition clause of the Constitution and the Extradition Act of 1793, which helped knit the new states together into a unified whole. Two hundred years later, in the 1987 case Puerto Rico v. Branstad, the Supreme Court sharply limited governors’ ability to refuse extradition requests.
At first, Minnesota, Texas, and the federal government seemed to be working together smoothly. Texas Rangers and federal agents arrested Castro the week after Hennepin County announced the charges against him, and he remained in a South Texas jail while Minnesota waited for Abbott to sign off on the paperwork. When I first spoke with Moriarty, near the end of June, she sounded unconcerned about the process. “It’s not unusual for a request to sit on somebody’s desk for a while” before a governor grants approval for extradition, she said.
But Minnesota’s request for Castro sat on Abbott’s desk for week after week, even as the governor signed off on other extraditions from Texas to Minnesota. What’s more, Castro’s arrest had started a ticking clock, thanks to a quirk of Texas law: A person detained pursuant to another state’s extradition request can be held in jail for only 90 days. Minnesota authorities worried that, if Castro were to hit that limit and be released before Texas allowed extradition, Castro might seek to dodge the charges by fleeing to Mexico. On August 18, with the 90-day limit approaching, Minnesota filed a complaint in federal court asking for a judge’s help in forcing Abbott to turn Castro over—or, alternatively, to extend his stay in jail until Abbott approved the transfer.
Abbott, a staunch ally of President Trump who is up for reelection in a deep-red state, did little to dispel the perception that he had been stalling for ideological reasons. “I don’t trust Tim Walz,” he commented after Minnesota filed its case, nodding to right-wing allegations about fraud in the state. A Texas legal filing responding to Minnesota’s suit included a non sequitur suggesting that Walz “is content to look the other way when the context is sexual violence against children by illegal aliens, but not when the context is immigration enforcement by federal officers.”
In court, Abbott has argued that Castro may not meet the legal criteria for an interstate “fugitive” under extradition law because Castro traveled to Texas under orders by ICE and may not have intentionally fled Minnesota justice. For this reason, Abbott says, the governor’s office simply needs more time to conduct an investigation into whether Castro is legally a fugitive. But, Lowens explained to me, there is little ambiguity under the law that “fled in this context really means left for any reason at all.” In his view, Abbott’s argument looks less like a compelling legal argument and more like “a means to buy them some more time.”
In his ruling last week, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. likewise seemed skeptical of Abbott’s reasoning. But Rodriguez nevertheless denied Minnesota’s motion, on the grounds that the state had sued too early—because Abbott hadn’t yet rejected Walz’s request. Abbott “managed to manipulate the system to run out the 90-day clock,” Moriarty said.
Meanwhile, according to new reporting from The New York Times, the Justice Department had been planning to bring charges against Castro in federal court. This would have offered Abbott an out: Castro could have been detained on the federal charges without Texas having to yield to Minnesota. But for unclear reasons, the Times reports, the case never materialized. When I reached out to the Justice Department last week to ask about the status of the investigation against Castro, DOJ stated that it “does not comment on the status or existence of pending criminal investigations.”
On Thursday morning, with no federal charges against him and his 90 days in jail expired, Castro walked free from a prison near Brownsville, Texas, just more than 10 miles from the Mexico border. “As far as we understand, he’s free to go wherever he wants to go,” Moriarty said. “There were no conditions of his release.” During an earlier hearing, an attorney for Texas suggested that the federal and Texas governments were “committed to ensuring that he’s not leaving the country,” but Moriarty said that she had not been provided with any information about what that might mean. Asked what that commitment entailed, the Justice Department declined to comment; the Department of Homeland Security also did not answer my question. In response to my query, Abbott’s office sent me a statement declaring that Castro “must understand that the eyes of law enforcement will remain fixed on him” as the governor’s office continues its “investigation.”
[Read: Inside Trump’s reversal on ICE]
Texas’s gambit is both a feat of technical evasiveness and a direct attack on the bonds between states that help cohere the union. Bryna Godar, a staff attorney for the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me that the precedent set by the Castro case “could potentially enable other states to similarly delay on extradition requests if they want to essentially deny them.” Imagine a splintering among the states, where red states reliably aid the law-enforcement efforts only of red states and blue states only of blue.
Romantic visions of American federalism as a force for liberty and democracy do not align neatly with any one political ideology. Some of the earliest interstate extradition fights involved slaveholders seeking the return of Black Americans who fled the South to escape from bondage. A recent round of battles between states began after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, as red states such as Texas criminalized abortion and blue states enacted “shield laws” to protect doctors from prosecution for prescribing medication across state borders. The Castro case is more straightforward—the legal mandate to hand over a defendant applies only when the person flees the prosecuting state—but it is the latest development in what Lowens described as an “arms race” between states over extradition.
The political scientist Donald Kettl has described Trump’s approach to federalism not as a principled stance on the appropriate scope of state or federal power but instead as “yet another arena for political contest.” Already, Trump’s use of presidential power to bully blue states has fractured the structure of “vertical” federalism, meaning the relationship between the federal government and the states. Now the desire to score political points is also weakening “horizontal” federalism, the bonds among the states. Once everything becomes politics, the structures that tie together the nation weaken. “That is not tenable,” Moriarty warned in a press conference after Judge Rodriguez’s decision. “That’s chaos.”
A spokesperson for DHS informed me that Castro remains suspended without pay, and offered a stern statement about the importance of ICE agents upholding their “sacred sworn oath.” Abbott’s stalling will not be able to delay a confrontation forever, at least so long as Castro remains within the United States. Moriarty pointed to language in Rodriguez’s ruling suggesting that, at some point, Abbott must make a decision one way or another. What Abbott chooses could help reinforce the fraying bonds that hold America’s 50 states together—or strain them further.
The post The Fight Between Texas and Minnesota Should Never Have Got This Far appeared first on The Atlantic.
