I don’t know what to make of this.
Federal authorities filed a court motion asking a judge to seal a document that revealed new details about an ICE operation in Houston’s East End that led to the deadly July 7 shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz said he “strongly objected” to the dissemination of the internal ICE document on Friday. He said it contained personal information about law enforcement officers and witnesses that could be used by “anti-law enforcement agitators who will use it to dox federal agents.”
Doxxing is the act of publishing private details about a person to punish or harass them.
Reitz didn’t explain how the document became public. But late last week, a federal prosecutor in his office filed a court motion acknowledging that the U.S. attorney’s office had “inadvertently” submitted the ICE records in federal court in an immigration case involving Daniel Tirado Pantoja, one of the witnesses to Salgado’s killing who was held for weeks in ICE custody.
Records show that one of Reitz’s prosecutors filed the ICE document as an exhibit on Aug. 11 to challenge Tirado’s release from ICE custody. A judge later ordered Tirado’s release.
The record remained public at a records terminal Thursday at the federal courthouse after Assistant U.S. Attorney Ariel Wiley — the same prosecutor in Reitz’s office whose name appears on the filing of the original document — asked to seal the exhibit late Friday, records show. The Chronicle obtained the document last week at the public terminal.
The motion to seal was filed after the Houston Chronicle reported that ICE agents wrote about the incident in an I-213 form, which is used by ICE agents to document their arrests of migrants and is seldom made public. The document detailed how an outside law enforcement agency supplied the ICE agents with a tip about two immigrants in a white van.
The intel set into motion an ICE operation to find the van. ICE agents found Salgado — also in a white van — as he prepared to take his brother and two construction workers to a job site. Salgado was not the original target of the operation, according to the documents and Reitz’s earlier remarks.
The ICE agents pursued the van, and the report says the driver rammed their vehicles. An ICE agent shot and killed Salgado on the 6800 block of Canal Street.
Wiley’s request does not specify which information in the partially redacted document authorities did not want made public. The unredacted information includes the names of the deportation officers who drafted their respective reports and two agents who arrested Tirado. It also contained personal details and a mugshot of Tirado.
See here for all my posts on this topic. Normally one would have to take a request like this seriously, because the Justice Department is a respected and generally trusted branch of the government run by honest professionals who take their mission seriously. We all know why that’s not the case right now, and I see no reason to give a partisan hatchet man like Aaron Reitz any benefit of the doubt. He can make his argument, but make him prove everything he claims, because we’ve seen far too many lies from everyone associated with Trump and his operation to believe a word they say.
UPDATE: Like I said, none of these evildoers deserve any benefit of the doubt.
Over the “strongest possible” objections from the federal prosecutor handling the case, leaders at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and then lying about it.
The agent, 52-year-old Christian Castro, allegedly shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in Minneapolis this January during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s immigration blitz that sent thousands of federal agents into the state. The incident was one of three shootings by immigration agents in the city, the other two of which were fatal.
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota had been preparing to charge Castro with deprivation of rights under color of law for the shooting of Sosa-Celis, according to several people familiar with the case. Those charges are similar to the ones leveled against Minneapolis police officers accused in George Floyd’s killing and can carry hefty prison sentences.
Late on Tuesday, Matthew Evans, the assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in charge of the case, told lawyers for Sosa-Celis and other victims to prepare for Castro to be charged “only with False Statements,” according to an email that was reviewed by ProPublica.
That charge would likely carry a far less severe punishment if he were convicted.
“This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in a remarkably candid account of internal deliberations. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”
He wrote that the false statement charges could come soon and would likely be filed under seal.
“It has been an honor and a privilege to try to get justice for your clients,” Evans concluded the email.
It may take decades to get to the bottom of all the corruption of this regime.
SEALING IS THE MOST EXTREME REMEDY
If the doxxing concern is the real reason and basis for the motion (which I have not seen), the obvious commensurate remedy is redaction of the name(s) of the agent(s) – i.e. blackening them out – rather than blocking access to the entire document.
Since the Houston Chronicle has already obtained the document, however, the cat is out of the bag, to put it metaphorically, and any sealing will just preserve the competitive edge of the HC relative to other news outlets.
I doubt that the Chronicle can be legally restrained (after the fact) since they weren’t a party to the case and didn’t do anything improper by accessing it at a public terminal at the courthouse. In the absence of a specific sealing order, court-filed documents are generally presumed public. But that doesn’t mean that the Chronicle should publish the names or that they will (assuming they haven’t yet).
They would have to exercise their editorial discretion and might still become a target even if there is no direct legal recourse by the government in the case in which the motion was filed.