ICE Officer Castro Pleads Not Guilty to Six False-Statement Counts; Unsealed Indictment Says He Fired Through a Closing Door

ICE officer Christian Castro pleaded not guilty on September 4, 2026 in federal court in McAllen, Texas to six counts of knowingly and willfully making materially false statements to the FBI about a shooting during Operation Metro Surge. He was released on a $75,000 unsecured bond with a GPS ankle monitor.

The unsealed indictment supplies what the record previously lacked. On January 14, 2026, Castro and a partner tried to stop a vehicle driven by a Venezuelan citizen in north Minneapolis, pursued the driver on foot, and tackled him in the front yard of a duplex. Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, 24, who lived there, came out to help during a struggle that lasted roughly 11 seconds. As the two men ran back inside and began closing the front door, Castro stood up and fired a single shot through the door, striking Sosa-Celis in the leg.

What the charges are actually about is the account, not the shot. Castro is not charged federally with the shooting. He is charged with what he told investigators about it: that he was on his back when he fired; that he was attacked by multiple assailants wielding a broom and snow shovel; and that the encounter lasted about three minutes rather than eleven seconds. The indictment states flatly that no person struck him with a broom as he described, and no persons wielded the broom and snow shovel as he described.

Each of those three claims does the same work: it converts a shot fired at a door that was closing into a shot fired by a man pinned and under attack. The eleven-seconds-to-three-minutes stretch is the one that shows the mechanism most plainly — duration is what makes a struggle a siege, and it is the detail a reviewer cannot check without the video.

Why the charge is the false statement rather than the shooting. This is the structural point and it cuts both ways. Prosecuting the account is prosecuting the thing the paper record can prove — it requires no jury finding about whether force was reasonable, only that the officer’s description was false. It also means the shooting itself remains federally unadjudicated. Minnesota charged Castro separately with assault and false reporting of a crime, which is where the use-of-force question actually sits; this corpus records Texas Governor Abbott refusing Minnesota’s extradition request on August 27. The state that wants to try the shooting cannot reach him; the federal government charged what it could.

Castro has been suspended without pay by DHS since February.

Read against the rest of Operation Metro Surge in this timeline — a legal observer killed by an ICE agent on January 7, 1,300 collateral arrests, 578 of 4,000 claimed arrests documented — this is the first criminal accountability to reach an individual officer from that operation. It arrived eight months later, in another state, and charges the report rather than the act.

Sourcing note. The plea, the six counts and their statutory description, the McAllen venue, the $75,000 unsecured bond and ankle monitor, the January 14 shooting, the 11-second struggle, the shot through the closing door, Sosa-Celis’s age and leg wound, the three enumerated false statements, the separate Minnesota charges, and the February suspension are carried by CBS News Minnesota from the unsealed indictment and corroborated by NBC News and the AP via PBS. The indictment itself was not read here and no docket number is recorded. The ledger’s framing that Castro is the “first ICE agent criminally charged” in a surge-era shooting is not carried — the ledger’s own fact-check flagged it as unverified against primary text, and a superlative of that kind needs a survey, not a wire adjective. Sosa-Celis’s age is given as 24 at the time of the incident; some early reporting described him as 26, and that discrepancy is unresolved. Named harm-subject: Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis is recorded in the victim-story deployment index as documented-act — the indictment establishes what happened to him, and his attorney has spoken on his behalf, but no first-person account by him or his family appears in these sources.