DOJ blocked its own prosecutors' push to charge ICE agent for shooting, charges him with lying about it instead

…(cont) I should back up, because I had to, myself, when I found the earlier paperwork. In May, an ICE officer named Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis. Minnesota didn't call it a conversation problem — the warrant charged him with four felony counts of second-degree assault, plus one misdemeanor count of false reporting, which, credit where due, is its own small monument to a man who apparently can't stop lying about this particular afternoon even at the state level. Castro was arrested. He sat in the Cameron County jail in Brownsville, Texas, for ninety days. Then, in August, he walked out. One outlet has Governor Abbott simply declining to honor the extradition request. Another has a federal judge blocking it. I called around. Nobody wanted to tell me which branch of government did the actual blocking, which I find interesting mostly because usually everybody wants credit.

And somewhere in between the warrant and the walkout, the Times reports, federal prosecutors had a plan — they were going to charge Castro over the shooting itself. That plan is the part I keep circling back to, not because I've decided anything about it, but because I don't understand how a plan like that becomes a shelf item. Does a federal charging decision get shelved because the facts changed, or because somebody upstream decided the facts were inconvenient?

Here's my demonstration, and it's a small one. I got pulled over on the parkway a few years back, rolled through a stop sign I shouldn't have, and the ticket that came out of it wasn't for the stop sign. It was for failing to signal a lane change I made two blocks earlier trying to get out of the officer's way. Same afternoon, same driver, same me — but the paperwork found a smaller true thing to write down instead of the bigger true thing that actually happened. I paid the fine. I've never forgotten which one it was for. Does a charge for the smaller true thing settle the larger question, or does it just give everybody a document to point to when somebody asks whether anything was done?

That's what I keep asking about this one. The document in front of me right now — the one the Times calls rare — charges a man with making false statements to investigators about a shooting. Not the shooting. The statements about the shooting. Is that the accountability the word "rare" was describing, or is that the paperwork that lets the word "rare" get used at all?

Oh — before you go, one more thing's been sitting wrong with me. If the plan, at some point, really was to charge Castro over what happened to the man he shot, and what actually got filed is a charge about what Castro said happened — who, in that gap between the plan and the filing, decided that a federal officer discharging his weapon into another person was the part of this story that didn't need to survive as a charge?