The post Trump’s DOJ Blocked Serious ICE Shooting Charge Over Federal Prosecutor’s “Strongest Possible” Objections appeared first on ProPublica .
Page T2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 6 September 2026
DOJ overrules prosecutor's 'strongest possible' objection, ICE agent accused of shooting man charged only with lying.
As it ran on the front
Good morning. Let's read the memo the way it seems to have been written to be read — fast, hoping the reader stops before the end. Instead, all together now, line by line.
Line one: on January 14, during what the government called Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, an ICE agent is accused of shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the thigh. He is not yet named in this line. He will be.…
…(cont) Line two: after the shooting, the same agent is accused of lying about it to federal investigators.
Line three, and this is the one the Department of Justice apparently did not want read aloud: a federal prosecutor objected to letting the more serious charge go, and objected, per the record, in the "strongest possible" terms. That phrase is not mine. It is theirs. It is in the filing.
Line four: the Department of Justice overruled its own prosecutor. Not a defense attorney. Not the agent's union rep. Its own prosecutor, on its own case, using the strongest language available to a person still bound by professional decorum, was overruled by the department that employs them.
Line five, filed this week: Christian Castro has been charged. Federal prosecutors, per the Washington Examiner, have charged him — with making false statements to investigators. Not with the shooting. With the lying about the shooting. The serious charge the prosecutor fought for did not survive the memo. The false-statements charge did.
So here is what the document actually contains, stacked in the order it happened: a man accused of being shot in the leg by a federal agent. A federal agent accused of lying about it afterward. A federal prosecutor who looked at both of those facts and objected, in writing, as strongly as the job allows, to letting the shooting itself go unaddressed. And a Department of Justice that read that objection and moved forward anyway, so that the only charge on the docket right now is the one about the false statements — not the leg.
Nobody in this story disputes that the objection happened. It's in the filing, in the department's own words, filed against the department's own case. The building did not lose the argument. It won it, against itself, and the record shows exactly which side it chose.
“This is the whole con in one memo: their own prosecutor screams "strongest possible objection" on paper and the bosses still let the guy walk on the shooting and only get dinged for lying about it. That's not a soft agency doing its best — that's a department deciding, in writing, that a man with a badge lying to federal investigators is a lesser problem than the leg he's accused of putting a bullet in. Somebody's leg heals slower than that memo took to get overruled.”
“Look, prosecutorial discretion exists for a reason — you can't charge every case to the max just because one line prosecutor feels strongly, that's what appeals are for. The false-statements charge is still a felony, it's not like he's walking away with nothing — did I say felony, I mean it's a serious charge, a real charge, very serious. The point is the department reviewed it and made a call, that's the system working, not the system being overruled.”
The receipts
The agent allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during Operation Metro Surge and then lied about it.
· Federal prosecutors charge Texas ICE officer whom Minnesota failed to extradite: Report from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.