Minnesota sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday in an attempt to force the state of Texas to hand over an arrested ICE agent accused of committing a crime on the job during Operation Metro Surge when he was stationed up north earlier this year.
Minnesota is in a race against the clock. State officials say there are only nine more days to extradite the agent before a mandatory release kicks in under Texas law, and they fear he will be released and flee to avoid prosecution.
The interstate tensions at play threaten to create the first major showdown between blue and red states over the conduct of agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been deployed in Democratic-leaning cities as part of the White House’s nationwide aggressive immigration-enforcement push.
A Hennepin County District Court judge issued a nationwide warrant for the federal agent, Christian Jeremiah Castro, after finding probable cause that the agent in January fired a gun at the front door of a Minneapolis home when he knew there were several people inside and that one of the bullets struck a Venezuelan man, Julio Sosa-Celis.
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Four months after the shooting, Hennepin County prosecutors criminally charged Castro with four separate counts of assault with a deadly weapon and falsely reporting a crime. According to the complaint, Castro told the FBI he’d been hit by a broom and a snow shovel while he was chasing someone on the home’s front lawn just before the shooting, but video evidence showed that “Victim 1 tossed the shovel onto the ground, where it remained throughout the incident, and stepped back toward the front door of the home.”
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said “the bullet traveled through the door and struck Mr. Sosa-Celis’s leg, before making its final impact in the wall of a child’s room.”
Investigators with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension traveled south to witness local Texas Rangers arrest Castro on May 29, and he’s been held at the Cameron County Jail.
However, he’s been in custody now for 81 days — and time is running out for Texas to conduct the kind of routine interstate transfer of prisoners that happens hundreds of times a day across the country.
On Tuesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a federal lawsuit in Texas asking a federal judge to declare that Abbott’s “withholding of a governor’s rendition warrant for Christian Castro is unconstitutional and unlawful.”
“He has no discretion, I repeat, he has no discretion to decline to do so. None. Yet Castro is still not here to face justice,” Ellison said at a press conference Tuesday morning.
Minnesota law-enforcement officials say that Abbott has simply ignored repeated requests for assistance. Ellison said Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s July 30 letter to the Texas governor went unanswered, as did his own Aug. 13 letter warning Abbott that Texas had until 5 p.m. Monday to send Castro north — or face a lawsuit.
A spokesperson with Abbott’s office said Tuesday afternoon that the governor would not be commenting on “pending extradition matters.”
In its lawsuit, Minnesota asks that a federal judge block Texas from simply running out the clock and releasing Castro, citing what it called “a substantial risk that Castro will flee and avoid prosecution in Minnesota.”
ICE does not appear to be publicly standing in the way, as the agency has distanced itself from the agent in question. The Department of Homeland Security told NOTUS on Tuesday that Castro is one of two officers who have been placed on administrative leave pending an internal investigation. DHS said officials at ICE and the Justice Department have reviewed “video evidence” that contradicts what these agents initially reported.
“Lying under oath is a serious federal offense. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is actively investigating these false statements,” DHS said by email through a spokesperson who did not identify themselves.
In Texas, the Minnesota officials are being represented locally by Austin lawyer George Chapman Lobb, whose firm website calls Abbott, the state’s two senators and its attorney general “a bunch of criminal fascists who are enabled by that unstable demented derelict living in the White House.”
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