An attorney for a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, who was charged with lying about the shooting of a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis, said on Friday that his client is eager to return to Minnesota to fight federal and state charges.
Christian Castro, 52, was indicted this week by a federal grand jury on charges of misleading investigators about the circumstances of the shooting on Jan. 14. It occurred while Castro, who is based in Texas, was deployed to Minnesota as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Minnesota state authorities have also charged Castro in connection with the incident, accusing him of assault. They have been seeking to have him extradited from Texas to Minnesota and said he is trying to evade justice.
But his defense attorney David Lindenmuth said Castro willingly surrendered himself to U.S. authorities on Thursday after federal charges were filed.
“He is ready to go to Minnesota and deal with this,” Lindenmuth said. “Let him have his day in court, then make up your opinions.”
Lindenmuth, who is representing Castro along with co-counsel Rolando Cantu, spoke to The Washington Post after Castro’s first court appearance on the federal charges before a U.S. magistrate judge in McAllen, Texas. During the brief proceeding, Castro entered a provisional not-guilty plea and was released on a $75,000 unsecured bond with orders to report to the federal court in Minneapolis on Sept. 18.
Castro faces six federal counts of lying to investigators who were probing the 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 ICE’s Minneapolis surge — a campaign that sparked national outrage, weeks of protests and condemnations from federal judges.
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.
An Army veteran, 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.”
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.
“We absolutely dispute the narrative that’s been put out there, and we maintain our client’s innocence,” Lindenmuth said Friday. “He deserves a day in court, and so far he has not had that opportunity.”
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 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.
They raised concerns during a court hearing last week that Castro, who at the time was being held in a Texas jail facing possible extradition on the state’s case, might pose a flight risk if he were released. They argued he had contacts in Mexico that would make it easy for him to flee.
Lindenmuth said Friday that Castro had always intended to return to Minnesota to face the state charges but did not have an opportunity to voluntarily do so before he was arrested on the state’s warrant in May. He said Castro had attempted to hire several attorneys in Minneapolis to represent him but was rejected by lawyers at every turn.
Ultimately, a federal judge cast doubt in a ruling last week on the idea that Abbott had legal grounds to deny the extradition, but refused for now to intervene, since the governor had not made a final decision on Minnesota’s extradition 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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