Victor Manuel Diaz, a 36-year-old Nicaraguan detained in the Minneapolis area under Operation Metro Surge, died on January 14, 2026 at Camp East Montana, the ICE tent facility on the Army's Fort Bliss base in El Paso, Texas — eight days after his arrest and roughly 1,200 miles from where he was taken. ICE called the death a "presumed suicide," but his family rejected that account, and the agency routed his autopsy to a military hospital that withholds its findings from the public, bypassing the El Paso County medical examiner who had ruled an earlier detainee's death at the same camp a homicide. Diaz was the third person to die at Camp East Montana in a 44-day span.
On May 18, 2026, Hennepin County prosecutors charged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Christian Castro with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the January 14, 2026 shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis through the front door of a home in north Minneapolis. County Attorney Mary Moriarty said security-camera and physical evidence show Castro was never under threat — he was not struck by a shovel, broom, or other object — and then filed a false account of the encounter. The U.S. Department of Justice had previously dropped the federal assault charges that the Department of Homeland Security brought against Sosa-Celis and his cousin Alfredo Aljorna in February 2026 after the same footage contradicted the ICE agents' sworn statements; ICE placed two agents on administrative leave at that time.
