Hennepin County charges ICE agent in January Minneapolis shooting of Venezuelan immigrant

On January 14, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents carrying out the federal "Operation Metro Surge" in north Minneapolis encountered Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, and his cousin Alfredo Aljorna outside a home. According to the criminal complaint filed four months later by the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, security-camera footage shows that Sosa-Celis was holding a snow shovel and was outside the home when one of the agents, Alfredo Aljorna, ran toward the home and slipped. After a brief struggle the two were separated; Sosa-Celis then helped Aljorna off the ground and into the house. Seconds later, agent Christian Castro got up off the ground and fired one shot through the front door of the home, striking Sosa-Celis in the leg. Four adults and two children were inside the home at the time of the shooting; ICE agents subsequently deployed tear gas and entered the home, taking the adults into custody.

The federal response in the days that followed was to charge the shooting victim and his cousin, not the agent who fired. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an initial statement identifying Sosa-Celis as the target of the ICE pursuit and asserting that two men, working together, had struck the agent with a shovel, prompting him to fire what DHS described as "a defensive shot to defend his life." A DOJ affidavit filed the next day in support of federal criminal charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna repeated and elaborated on that account. In February 2026, after reviewing the city's security footage, the Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss those charges and acknowledged that the agents had made "false statements" under oath; ICE placed two agents on administrative leave during the resulting internal review.

On May 18, 2026, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced state-level charges against Castro: four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, with a nationwide warrant issued for his arrest. At the news conference Moriarty stated that the evidence shows Castro "was never under threat" during the encounter and was not struck by a shovel, broom, or any other object, and that his subsequent account of the shooting was contradicted by video, physical evidence, and witness statements. The charges against a sitting federal agent operating under a federal enforcement program, brought by a county prosecutor, are unusual in form; their substance — that a federal officer used unjustified deadly force against a civilian and then misrepresented the encounter on official record — is the conduct recorded here.

For archival purposes, this entry records the underlying federal conduct on January 14, 2026 (the shooting and the subsequent false official statements) rather than the May 18 state charging decision, which is an accountability response and not itself an anti-democratic act. The institutional sequence — federal agents using force against a civilian, federal officers misrepresenting the encounter under oath, and a federal agency initially prosecuting the victim on the basis of those misrepresentations — is the pattern the archive is preserving regardless of how the state prosecution of Castro ultimately resolves.