In an extraordinary court filing, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota acknowledged on Thursday that officials had provided incorrect information about a shooting by an immigration agent last month.
The prosecutor, Daniel N. Rosen, asked a judge to dismiss charges against a man who was wounded in that shooting, as well as another man who had been accused of attacking the agent. Mr. Rosen wrote that “newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations” that federal officials made in a charging document and in courtroom testimony.
“Accordingly, dismissal with prejudice will serve the interests of justice,” wrote Mr. Rosen, who was nominated by President Trump to be U.S. attorney in Minnesota.
The shooting on Jan. 14 of Julio C. Sosa-Celis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent touched off hours of tense protests in Minneapolis, where thousands of federal agents had been sent as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state.
The federal government initially described Mr. Sosa-Celis and his co-defendant, Alfredo A. Aljorna, as violent agitators who had attacked an agent with a shovel and broom. The government has said both men are from Venezuela and are in the United States illegally. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused them of trying to kill the agent.
But inconsistencies soon emerged in the government’s description of the incident. Officials changed their account of which of the two men had fled from agents in a car before the shooting. And instead of three people attacking the agent, as the Department of Homeland Security had first claimed, charging documents suggested that there were only two.
Still, prosecutors pushed ahead with felony cases against the men and sought to keep them detained ahead of trial.
The filing from Mr. Rosen, whose office has been decimated by resignations since the immigration enforcement surge began, was the latest instance of the Department of Homeland Security providing an account of a shooting that later proved questionable or outright wrong.
In Chicago, where a Border Patrol agent shot and wounded a woman last year, prosecutors dropped the charges against her after concerns about preservation of evidence were raised. The woman, Marimar Martinez, has since sought to clear her name and has pushed back against the Trump administration’s description of her as a domestic terrorist.
And after two fatal shootings by immigration agents in Minneapolis this year, President Trump and his allies rushed to cast the people who were killed, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, as domestic terrorists. Administration officials persisted in those claims even after some of their accounts were contradicted by videos.
Federal officials announced earlier Thursday that they were ending their enforcement surge in Minnesota after more than two months. More than 4,000 undocumented immigrants were arrested during the campaign, officials said.
Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the motion to dismiss the charges. The judge hearing the case did not immediately act on that motion.
Lawyers for Mr. Sosa-Celis and Mr. Aljorna did not immediately reply to requests for comment, although they have previously raised doubts about the government’s description of the shooting.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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