|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IN spite of the drumpf / trump-vance administration's neo-nazi fascist propaganda campaign not only defending the murders and the civil liberties and human rights violations committed by dhs' "operation metro surge" in Minnesota, Hennepin County and the state are charging ice hsi & cbp gestapo agents for crimes committed on the the residents of the metro Minneapolis - St Paul area. Evidence is showing dhs was not running a law enforcement / immigration enforcement operation. This was and still is a violent action directed not by people qualified to "police" anyone but was and continues to be directed by no class thugs with gang leaders mentality, and this is not just in Minnesota, it is nation wide. These from the Independent.....
ICE officer charged over nonfatal shooting of man during Minnesota immigration crackdown
This is the second ICE agent to have been charged from the Minnesota immigration crackdown
Hannah Fingerhut & Tim SullivanAn ICE agent was charged in the nonfatal shooting of a Venezuelan man during Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, officials announced on Monday.
Officer Christian Castro is charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime in the Jan. 14 shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said at a news conference.
Federal authorities initially accused Sosa-Celis and Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna of beating an officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel during the incident, but a federal judge later dismissed the charges and federal officials opened an investigation into whether two immigration officers lied under oath about what happened.
A federal officer shot Sosa-Celis in the thigh after he and another officer chased a different man to the apartment duplex where the man and Sosa-Celis lived. Moriarty said both Sosa-Celis and the other man were legally in the U.S.
A warrant was issued for his arrest.
Last month, federal authorties charged a different ICE agent with assault after allegedly threatening victims with his firearm.
Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department officials didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
DHS previously said that lying under oath is a “serious federal offense” and that making false statements could result in an officer being fired or prosecuted.
The city of Minneapolis last month released video of the incident captured from a distance by a city-owned security camera.
The administration sent thousands of officers to the Minneapolis and St. Paul area as part of Trump’s national deportation campaign. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, called Operation Metro Surge its largest immigration enforcement operation ever and deemed it a success.
But tensions mounted during the weekslong campaign and the shooting deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers provoked mass unrest and questions about officers’ conduct.
Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, has been conducting investigations into multiple incidents and filed charges last month against an ICE agent for alleged actions while on duty.
Minnesota leaders and the Trump administration have since clashed over which has the authority to investigate and prosecute officers for conduct while on duty. The Trump administration has suggested that Minnesota officials don’t have jurisdiction.
State officials have said they don’t trust the federal government to investigate itself or hold officers accountable.
Hennepin County continues to investigate Good's and Pretti’s killings and sued the administration in March over access to evidence in the two cases, as well as in the case against Sosa-Celis. Although Moriarty hasn't charged anyone in either killing, she has said she's confident her office's investigations will bring transparency, even if not criminal prosecution.
ICE agent criminally charged in Minnesota for pointing gun at drivers, prosecutors say
First-of-its-kind case targets ICE agent who allegedly pointed a gun ‘at the heads of community members’ during Operation Metro Surge
Alex Woodward in New YorkProsecutors in Minnesota have criminally charged a federal immigration officer with assault in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case following surges of agents into cities under Donald Trump’s administration.
Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. faces two counts of second-degree assault for allegedly threatening victims with his firearm, according to a criminal complaint announced by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Thursday.
Morgan is accused of speeding up alongside a victim’s car, pulling out a gun and repeatedly pointing it at people inside during a February incident.
Local law enforcement has issued a warrant for Morgan’s arrest. If convicted, he could face up to 36 months in prison.
The charges mark the first against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer for actions during Operation Metro Surge, which saw hundreds of federal agents deployed to the state for dragnet-like arrests targeting immigrants and protesters. The surge also included the fatal shooting of two Minnesota residents in scenes that sparked outrage throughout the nation.
On February 5, Morgan — behind the wheel of an unmarked rental SUV — was illegally driving on the shoulder of Highway 62 when another car briefly moved into the shoulder to slow him down, according to Moriarty’s office.
When the victim moved back into traffic, Morgan sped up and then matched the pace of the other car, opened his window, and pointed his gun “directly at both victims in the other vehicle while continuing to drive illegally on the shoulder,” her office said.
The charges “reflect an important milestone in our efforts to seek accountability for the harms inflicted on community,” Moriarty said in a statement.
Asked during a press conference whether her office is concerned about potential blowback from the Trump administration, which has resisted efforts from local law enforcement to investigate federal agents who have shot and killed Minnesota residents, Moriarty said it is “not a concern of ours.”
“Our role, by the way, is to hold people accountable if they violate the laws of Minnesota,” she added. “In this particular case, we feel strongly that this agent committed second-degree assault against both of these victims. We have charged the case, and our intent is to hold them accountable.”
The Trump administration has also suggested federal agents possess “absolute immunity” from state-level prosecutions, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, in a statement shared by Homeland Security, has told agents that “no one” — including city and state officials — “can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”
Moriarty told reporters that the administration is “wrong” to believe that agents possess absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.
The Department of Justice could, however, try to remove a state-level case to federal court, where state prosecutors could continue to press a case against the officers.
“The burden is on the agent to show that what they were doing was in the scope of their authority as a federal agent,” Moriarty said.
“Our opinion is that illegally driving on a shoulder, pulling up to a car, and pointing a gun at the heads of two community members ... is well beyond the scope of their authority as federal agents,” she said. “We will litigate that in court.”
The Independent has requested comment from Homeland Security.
Moriarty’s office is investigating several other violent incidents involving federal officers, though she has accused the administration of “obstructing” efforts to collect evidence.
In this case, her office was able to collect evidence from state and local law enforcement, including Minnesota State Patrol, Minneapolis Police and the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office.
Officials in Minnesota are separately investigating the arrest of a U.S. citizen after ICE broke into his home at gunpoint and dragged him outside into freezing conditions while he was wearing only boxer shorts and Crocs sandals.
The arrest of 56-year-old ChongLy “Scott” Thao is being reviewed as a potential case of kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment, officials in Ramsey County announced earlier this week.
ICE and Border Patrol agents killed three people in Minneapolis — Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti — within the month of January alone. But more than two months later, the status of those investigations remains unclear.
A lawsuit filed by Minnesota officials last month calls on a federal judge to force the Trump administration to share evidence it collected after the shootings, alleging that Homeland Security and federal law enforcement agencies have stonewalled attempts for information about incidents that triggered national demonstrations against the president’s mass deportation efforts.
In the cases of Good and Pretti, both 37-year-old U.S. citizens, Homeland Security officials insisted that both protesters posed a direct threat to law enforcement officers when they were fatally shot.
In the weeks after their deaths, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan assumed control of Minnesota operations from Border Patrol’s Greg Bovino, who was relieved of his “commander-at-large” duty and sent back to his role in southern California.
Homan announced in February that immigration agents would be winding down operations in the state, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of immigrants and drew dozens of lawsuits alleging illegal use of force and unconstitutional arrests.
At the White House on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance strongly defended the ICE shooting in Minnesota, saying the officer was defending himself and called Renee Nicole Good's death "a tragedy of her own making." For a closer look at training for ICE agents, Amna Nawaz spoke with Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Amna Nawaz:
For a closer look at training for ICE agents and what we know, I'm joined now by Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. She's now at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Juliette, welcome back to the show. Thanks for joining us.
Juliette Kayyem, Former U.S. Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary: Thanks for having me.
Amna Nawaz:
So, as you see, there's competing narratives now on whether or not the ICE agent was justified in using deadly force here. There are federal guidelines, standardized training of some kind.
Walk us through what those guidelines and the training shows when it comes to the use of deadly force.
Juliette Kayyem:
OK, so the Department of Homeland Security is guided or their agents are guided by rules and protocols regarding engagement with the community.
So the number one priority is no loss of life. That is in their -- that is in DHS' own regulations. The second is de-escalation. We have heard that word a lot lately, which is, it's the responsibility of the law enforcement agent to ensure that they do not put themselves in a position in which there is imminent danger.
There are all sorts of caveats and qualifications, but, as a general rule, police officers and law enforcement do not shoot into moving cars, do not put themselves in front of cars, because those are things that are easily de-escalated.
The car, you can get the license plate. You know where the person likely lives at that stage. And so these rules guide both federal law enforcement and most state and local law enforcement. And that is why the videos are raising so many significant concerns about that interaction, that moment in which a federal law enforcement officer, the ICE agent, is engaged with a civilian who may or may not have known what they were expecting of her.
I just want to add for your audience, because the politics of this are quite loud, the way it's talked about now is as if use of force is an on and on-or-off switch, right? Like, someone didn't comply, use of force, right? It doesn't work that way.
Most good law enforcement and training, you would think about use of force as sort of a dimmer, up and down. And it's the responsibility of the armed agent to ensure that you are sort of bringing any sort of tension, any sort of interaction down, so that you don't result in the killing of an unarmed civilian who was not under any law enforcement orders or any search.
Amna Nawaz:
So, Juliette, based on all of that, let me pull on that a little bit more from you here, and based on what we have seen in the videos, was there another way in which you might have expected the officer to respond in this incident?
Juliette Kayyem:
Yes, I mean, step aside. Step aside. I mean, you could -- at that stage, he could -- he saw that it was a woman.
We -- she's been accused of lots of things by the White House in terms of, was she engaged in activism, was she trying to run him down? He could have easily -- and some people looking at the videos believed that he actually wasn't in the line of sight of the car -- or the line of impact of the car. And you let the car go on and either pull it over 10 feet away or get the license plate.
And so this interaction that results in not one, but multiple bullets being put through the window of an unarmed civilian, who may or may not have known what ICE was expecting of her, I think shows the challenges of these large deployments, ICE with an unclear mandate of what they're supposed to do, and the fact that you have not local law enforcement so engaged with communities that do not know them and would view them as a hostile.
Amna Nawaz:
I want to ask you too about the latest in what we have heard on the investigation. Minnesota state law enforcement officials are saying federal agencies are denying the state investigators access to the evidence. The Minnesota agency says it's now withdrawing from that probe.
We saw the DHS secretary say that it's a matter of jurisdiction. What do you make of that? Is that standard?
Juliette Kayyem:
No. And it's absolutely not.
It's -- basically, what has happened is because you had the secretary of homeland security and then the president and then today the vice president so aggressively conclude what the investigation is -- and I have to admit, just so, a very shameful maligning of who she is as a human being -- I mean, she's a mother and she was unarmed -- is -- and they called her a domestic terrorist.
It is hard to imagine that this investigation would be objective, because they have already created that narrative. Now, one could argue that the FBI is not part of those agencies and will do this objectively, and one would hope that that was true, especially if it came out of the Minnesota FBI offices.
But the more important thing is, in most of these cases, in all -- I can't think of another case -- where you have an incident like this, you have concurrent investigations, because you don't know what's going to result here. It might be a federal crime, but it might not rise to that level, and it would still be a state crime.
So, in most cases, we often hear of concurrent investigations, concurrent prosecutions, because we don't quite know what's going to happen at the start. Unfortunately, the White House has created a narrative of what this is. And I would anticipate that the state is separately going to start an investigation because of their lack of confidence in the federal investigation.
Amna Nawaz:
All right, that is Juliette Kayyem, formerly of DHS, now at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Juliette, thank you.
Juliette Kayyem:
Thank you.
By —
Amna Nawaz serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
By —
Courtney Norris is the deputy senior producer of national affairs for the NewsHour. She can be reached at cnorris@newshour.org or on Twitter @courtneyknorris
Two federal agents have been suspended, and criminal charges against a man one of them shot have been dropped, after a prosecutor in Minnesota revealed that the story those agents told about the shooting was not true.
The suspensions and dismissal followed an extraordinary court filing on Thursday, in which Minnesota’s top federal prosecutor, Daniel N. Rosen, asked a judge to dismiss charges against the man who was wounded in that shooting, as well as another man who had been accused of attacking the agent who opened fire.
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.
By Friday, the case had been dismissed with prejudice, meaning the men cannot be recharged. The two agents had been suspended and were being investigated, Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement.
“Video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Mr. Lyons said. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation.”
Mr. Lyons said the agents, whose names have not been released, could face termination and criminal prosecution.
The shooting on Jan. 14 of Julio C. Sosa-Celis by an ICE 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 details of what happened that night are unclear, and the government’s account of the shooting has shifted. Initially, federal officials 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 episode. 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. Mr. Sosa-Celis, who was shot in the leg, had injuries that were not life-threatening. Mr. Aljorna was not wounded. They were both arrested, officials have said, after agents used tear gas to force them out of a building.
Brian D. Clark, a lawyer for Mr. Sosa-Celis and Mr. Aljorna, said in a statement that his clients were “overjoyed” by Mr. Rosen’s request. “They are so happy justice is being served by the government’s request to dismiss all charges with prejudice,” he said, adding that the identity “of the ICE agent should be made public and he should be charged for his crime.”
A third man was arrested after the shooting and was accused by the Department of Homeland Security of attacking the agent. Charges were never filed against that man, Gabriel Hernandez Ledezma, and court records gave no indication that he was involved in any attack. Still, Mr. Hernandez Ledezma, who is Venezuelan, was detained by immigration officials and sent to Texas.
In a petition seeking release from detention, Mr. Hernandez Ledezma’s lawyer wrote that his client believed he was being held out of state because he was “a key witness that undermines the federal government’s narrative of what occurred.”
The filing on Thursday from Mr. Rosen, whose office has been decimated by resignations since the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota 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, Mr. 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.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 14, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 ICE Agents Suspended In Accusation Of Fake Story
An ICE Story Unravels: The collapse of the Trump administration’s version of events in the case of Julio Sosa-Celis was only the most recent instance in which officials gave an account of a shooting that was later contradicted.
Menacing Protesters at Home: Demonstrators in Minneapolis and St. Paul said in sworn statements that they were singled out by agents who found the addresses of their homes and showed up there.
Don Lemon Pleads Not Guilty: The broadcast journalist appeared in federal court with four others charged with disrupting a Minnesota church service to protest the behavior of immigration agents.
Renee Good’s Partner: Becca Good attended a memorial for Renee Good, offering words of compassion and resilience to the crowd gathered in a snow-covered Minneapolis park.
Minnesota Detainees: A judge ordered the Trump administration to give detainees at an immigration facility near Minneapolis adequate access to lawyers, saying the government could have isolated thousands from legal services.