I spent 35 years wearing a badge in this county, and I learned one thing that never stopped being true: the law doesn’t care what agency patch is on your shoulder. At least it isn’t supposed to. What we’re watching right now proves that promise is being broken on purpose, by the very people sworn to keep it.
An ICE officer named Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Sosa-Celis, through a closed door in Minneapolis back in January. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t just get the story wrong — DHS lied to the American public. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stood in front of cameras and called it self-defense, an “ambush” with a broom handle and a snow shovel.
Video surfaced the following month and shredded that fiction. Federal prosecutors quietly dropped the assault charges they’d filed against Sosa-Celis and another man, because the men who filed them knew the truth wouldn’t survive a courtroom. This week, Castro was finally indicted — but only for lying to investigators. Not for putting a bullet through a door and into a man’s leg. Not for the deprivation of a man’s civil rights…