TPM’s David Kurtz gives a great overview of where that case in which Minnesota tried to get Greg Abbott to follow the law and extradite an ICE agent they had arrested on felony charges stands.
One of the weirder side plots last week in the extradition fight between Minnesota and Texas over ICE agent Christian Castro was news that the Trump DOJ was considering bringing federal charges against him for the same shooting for which Minnesota had already indicted him.
It was weird for a lot of reasons:
- The Trump administration hasn’t pursued criminal charges against federal agents for the high-profile shootings during Operation Metro Surge (or for misconduct during similar blue-city invasions in Los Angeles and Chicago).
- The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office had already charged Castro’s victims within two days of the shooting before later dropping the case when evidence emerged that Castro had lied about the incident and was suspended by ICE.
- At the same time the Justice Department was reportedly considering charging Castro, it was coming to his defense in the extradition fight, albeit indirectly. In a move that showed the Trump DOJ was clearly colluding with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, it inserted itself into the extradition case by providing factual confirmation for one of Abbott’s legal arguments for why he was slow-rolling Minnesota’s request for Castro.
Against this backdrop it was hard to take seriously the reports — from CNN and CBS News — that federal charges against Castro were imminent. CNN went so far as to suggest charges could come down that day, before the federal judge ruled on the extradition request, as a way of making sure Castro stayed in custody even if Minnesota lost in court. “The tight timeline puts pressure on both federal and state prosecutors to keep Castro in custody,” CNN reported.
But no charges came that day or the next day or in the nearly full week since. Castro was released from jail in Brownsville on Thursday amid fears by law enforcement that he would flee to Mexico.
Subsequent reporting by the New York Times and Minnesota Public Radio is a bit opaque on what happened to the supposed federal case. As the NYT put it over the weekend, “those plans unraveled” and “fell apart in the final hours for reasons that remain unclear.”
Piecing together the reporting and what we know after 18 months of watching the Trump DOJ do President Trump’s bidding, what seems most likely to have happened is that Main Justice scotched the effort by the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office to bring charges against Castro.
I want to be clear that’s not confirmed, but it’s what the available evidence points to.
See here, here, and here for some background. Kurtz did a similar overview when Castro was released, in that last link. He also names the likely villain in this scenario, and it’s a familiar name if you’re a close watcher of the Trump Justice Department. Go read the rest, and we’ll see when or if we get further updates.