Federal Prosecutor Investigating ICE Officer for Civil Rights Crimes Fired

Here's a wild one out of Minnesota: the federal prosecutor who was building a civil rights case against an ICE officer just got fired — and it happened the same week that officer was finally charged with a crime, though not the crime a lot of people expected.

Quick backstory: back in January, ICE officer Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant named Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. The government's story about what happened kept shifting — accounts of the interaction that led to the shooting shifted in the immediate aftermath, with the Department of Homeland Security initially saying Sosa-Celis fled a traffic stop, crashed, and fled on foot. But video evidence later contradicted that, and things got messy — federal prosecutors actually dropped charges against Sosa-Celis and another man in February, citing new evidence, and dismissed them with prejudice, meaning they couldn't be brought back. Castro himself ended up suspended.

Now to the actual news: a federal prosecutor in Minnesota who was investigating that ICE officer for possible civil rights crimes has been fired, according to four sources familiar with the matter. That prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans, was investigating ICE officer Christian Castro over the shooting. This week, the Justice Department charged Castro with making false statements about the incident, though the indictment remains sealed. Notice what's missing there — a false-statements charge is a lot lighter than a civil rights violation.

And that's exactly the controversy. ProPublica reported that Evans told the shooting victims' attorneys to prepare for Castro to only be charged with making false statements, which carries lesser penalties than a charge that he violated people's constitutional rights. Basically, Evans appears to have said the DOJ was blocking him from pursuing the tougher charge. Days after that story broke, he lost his job. The DOJ's stated reason isn't about the case's merits, though — three sources say Evans is under investigation by the Justice Department, with two saying it focuses on allegations of leaking. Other outlets reported similarly: the prosecutor has been fired and is under investigation for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe.

Why should you care if you don't live in Minneapolis? This is really a story about whether federal prosecutors can push back on their own bosses when they think a case against a government officer is being softened — and what happens to them if they do. It's landing on top of a bigger pattern: a whole section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division saw resignations over how it handled a related ICE shooting death in the same city just weeks earlier. Whether Evans was fired for leaking, as the DOJ claims, or for pushing too hard on a politically sensitive case, is now the real question — and it's one prosecutors, watchdogs, and the public will be watching closely.