Christian Castro, the ICE officer who authorities have accused of shooting at a migrant and lying about it, has been taken into custody in Minnesota.
Officer Castro had his first appearance in court, where the judge set a high bond, deeming him to be a risk to flee to avoid the case against him.
He faces four felony counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and one misdemeanor count of falsely reporting a crime.
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He was part of President Trump’s immigration enforcement surge to Minneapolis. Prosecutors say that in January he fired his gun blindly into a home, striking one migrant and endangering others. He then lied about the shooting, claiming he had been attacked by two migrants and was defending himself.
“Christian Castro will not escape accountability,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at a press conference Thursday.
He also cast the prosecution as a way to “seek accountability” for the broader Trump immigration surge in Minnesota, which saw two U.S. citizens killed in confrontations with Homeland Security personnel.
Officer Castro’s incident occurred between those two shootings.
After the shooting, a supervisor at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordered him to return to Texas, his normal duty station.
When Minnesota sought to extradite him, he resisted and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott delayed a decision on sending him back, questioning whether he really met the definition of “fugitive” because he’d left Minnesota under agency orders and not on his own.
Mr. Ellison had sued, but a federal judge declined to get involved, saying Mr. Abbott hadn’t refused the extradition and was allowed more time — though the judge said he questioned the Texas governor’s parsing of the word fugitive.
Officer Castro came back to Minnesota on his own, likely to appear in a federal court on Friday on charges of lying about the incident.
Local officials had expected him to turn himself in to them, but said he didn’t do that, so the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension arrested him.
Mr. Ellison said that with Officer Castro now having appeared in court, the lawsuit against Mr. Abbott has been dismissed.
Prosecutors say they expect Officer Castro to try to force their case out of state court and into federal court.
The state judge set bail at either $400,000 or a lower $200,000 payment if he agrees to waive extradition in the future and to meet monitoring conditions.
According to the case against him, he fired into a home on Jan. 14, wounding an occupant. Prosecutors said one bullet lodged in the wall of a child’s bedroom.
Initially, ICE claimed that men had attacked Officer Castro and the shooting occurred as he was fending off the attack.
Officer Castro is now accused of fabricating that story.
The man who was shot in the leg, Julio Sosa-Celis, was initially charged with beating the ICE officer. Those charges were dropped in February after the Justice Department said the evidence didn’t support Officer Castro’s version of events.
Minnesota prosecutors indicted Officer Castro on May 18, and the state issued a warrant for his arrest that day.
He was arrested in Texas on May 29 but released after 90 days.
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