Two federal officers appear to have lied about an incident last month in Minneapolis that ended with one of them shooting a Venezuelan immigrant in the leg, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons said Friday.
The two officers are under investigation by the Justice Department, Lyons said. The announcement comes one day after federal prosecutors dropped the criminal cases against two immigrants in connection with the Jan. 14 episode. Department of Homeland Security leaders, including Secretary Kristi Noem, had previously defended the officers, saying they had fended off an “attempted murder” and that one officer had fired in self-defense.
“A joint review by ICE and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Lyons said in a statement. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation….The U.S. Attorney’s Office is actively investigating these false statements.”
Agents had initially said that two men — Alfredo Aljorna and Julio Sosa Celis – assaulted them with a broom and a shovel before one of them shot Sosa Celis. But that account was quickly called into question, and prosecutors now say “newly discovered evidence” contradicts the officers’ story.
Local law enforcement and prosecutors are also investigating the incident. The reversal by ICE comes a day after the White House announced it was ending its surge of federal immigration enforcement officers in the Twin Cities and after a judge excoriated the Trump administration for violating rights of immigration detainees held at a local facility.
It’s the latest twist in a harrowing odyssey for the two men initially charged with assaulting the officers, and for several other immigrants who lived in the apartment complex where the confrontation occurred.
On the night of the shooting, ICE also detained Aljorna’s 19-year-old partner — who arrived in the country as a minor and was initially housed in a humanitarian shelter — and whisked her to Texas and then New Mexico for potential deportation. A federal judge in New Mexico deemed her detention illegal and ordered her quickly freed after learning that the couple’s one-year-old son had been badly burned and required emergency surgery.
Paul Magnuson, the federal judge presiding over the criminal case against Aljorna and Sosa, ordered them released from pretrial detention, only for ICE to pick them up and put them in immigration custody. Magnuson, a Reagan appointee, also ordered ICE to refrain from deporting potential witnesses to the incident Another judge, George W. Bush appointee Patrick Schiltz, also deemed that detention of the two defendants was illegal and ordered them freed.
Prosecutors said in a brief court filing Thursday that the account offered by an FBI agent who signed an affidavit supporting the charges and testified in court “was based on information presented to the” agent that turned out to be “materially inconsistent” with the newly discovered information.
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