ICE Allegedly Shot Someone. Texas Let Him Go

0:00Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money. If you've ever found a good therapist, you know the relief of finally having someone who can sit with you in all your jumbled up feelings. It can feel so comforting. It can even feel like love. And that can get confusing and ethically hazardous fast. For recent episode, I talked to therapists and clients about catching romantic feelings in the therapy office. I started to notice that I would really look forward to my sessions. And I'm a girl that doesn't really brush my hair a whole lot. And I would make sure that, you know, I look nice. And all of a sudden, it clicked like I had a dream one night that there was some sort of weird electricity between us. You can hear that episode of Death, Sex, and Money wherever you get podcasts. Heads up here at the top.

1:05The story you're about to hear is moving quickly. By the time you listen, things may have changed. I've been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be caught dead to rights. Like when does evidence become irrefutable? And how much does irrefutable evidence matter at the moment? I've been thinking about all this, especially when it comes to a case playing out in Texas and Minnesota. It's the case of Christian Castro. So Quintet, how sure are we that back in January, an ice agent named Christian Castro shot a fleeing immigrant in the leg? We are pretty sure, I think it's fair to say. How sure are we that anything's going to be done about it? That is a much bigger question, Mark. Quintet Jurassic from over the Atlantic.

2:07She's been thinking about all this too. So we're going to take a moment and tell you Christian Castro's story. In January, Castro was stationed in Minnesota, part of Operation Metro Surge. He was helping to pull over a car. He suspected the driver was in the country illegally. And then the man inside tried to flee. Initially, there was some dispute about what happened next. Federal agents under attack overnight protests did turn violent in Minneapolis. At first, the government claimed Christian Castro had been attacked. This has come after officials say an agent was forced to shoot and defend himself when he was ambushed trying to arrest and illegal alien. Officers detained two men, Julio Sosa-Seles and Alfredo Alhornah. Alfredo was the man in the car that night. Julio was his roommate. The guy had been shot. The Department of Homeland Security said Christian Castro had been attacked with a snow shovel

3:12and a broom for three minutes. They said he fired because he was defending himself. Later, city security video came out and it showed something pretty different. So what the video footage showed is these two cars pull up in front of Alhornah and Sosa-Seles's house, the two men run out of the car. There's some kind of interaction with a third person chasing them who seems to be Castro, but there's definitely no attack with a snow shovel. Someone was shoveling and then he seems to drop the shovel and book it. He gets hit with the shovel in the video. There is this some kind of long object that gets thrown at some point. I believe Alhornah's lawyers have said it was a broom and then the men run into the house and Castro fires. So the version of the events that we see from that video is very, very different, especially because that scuffle takes place very, very quickly.

4:15It's really like a couple of seconds before they run into the house. I feel like this is such a familiar story now from the federal government and the fact that video came out that seemed to disprove the government's initial story. It just raises this question of accountability, right? Like, will there be accountability for the officers involved here? It's a really tough question. The state of Minnesota wants there to be accountability in this case. They filed charges against Christian Castro back in May, but Castro's bosses did already send him back to Texas. And so far, Texas has refused to send him back. Eight months after this confrontation, does anyone know where Christian Castro even is at the moment? Right now, I don't think anybody does. Until last week, he had been in a jail in Texas, in South Texas, but he walked free.

5:20And I have not been able to find anything that indicates that anyone is keeping tabs on him. So he may be in Texas, but we don't know. Today on the show, why the decision to shield this ICE agent from accountability is so troubling. For the victims here and for the rest of us, I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around. Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money. If you've ever found a good therapist, you know the relief of finally having someone who can sit with you in all your jumbled up feelings, it can feel so comforting, it can even feel like love, and that can get confusing and ethically hazardous fast. For recent episode, I talked to therapists and clients about catching romantic feelings

6:24in the therapy office. I started to notice that I would really look forward to my sessions, and I'm a girl that doesn't really brush my hair a whole lot. And I would make sure that, you know, I look nice, and all of a sudden, it clicked like I had a dream one night that there was some sort of weird electricity between us. You can hear that episode of Death, Sex, and Money wherever you get podcasts. I want to go back to January 2026, Operation Metro Surge, because the story of what happened the night that Christian Castro allegedly fired the shot, which both hit a man in the leg and lodged in a child's play pen, which is like super alarming when you just say it out loud. It's a story that I think my listeners will be familiar with, right?

7:26Minneapolis, officers are driving around, running license plates, run a license plate, of someone and say, ah, that pings as someone who maybe we should be pursuing and begin pursuing. What happens then? Because it's sort of, it takes this very familiar path of like, they're tracking a license plate, and then they eventually they realize a person, like, that's not the person driving the car, but they're still pursuing kind of thing. So what, so what happened? So this guy Alfredo Alhorna, he's just driving around Minneapolis, city streets. He's driving in Minneapolis. The ice runs the plate on his car and discovers the car is registered to somebody who they believe is should not be in the United States. So they start chasing Alhorna. He drives home. You can see on the surveillance footage that was later released, what happens is that the car pulls up in front of Alhorna's house.

8:27One of his housemates, Julio Sosaceles is standing there. Alhorna tries to run into the house. Castro follows him. What Castro says happened is that Castro was attacked with a broom and with a snow shovel. What the video footage seems to show is there's no snow shovel. There may be a broom, but it doesn't seem like he, Castro was attacked with it. Alhorna and Sosaceles run into the house, close the door and Castro fires his shot, which then hits Sosaceles in the leg and lodges in a wall inside the house in your play pen where a child living in the house wouldn't usually play. Yikes. So what follows is like this week's long process of figuring out exactly what actually did happen, partially using video footage. In that time, that it took to figure out who was saying what and what was true, what happened to Christian Castro, the alleged shooter here, the ICE agent?

9:29Castro leaves the state. We have documents now that were released as part of a lawsuit that shortly after the shooting, Castro's boss at ICE says, hey, we know that you've been assigned to Minnesota for this, immigration surge, operation, metro surge. We want you to go back to your home office in South Texas. Any reasoning for that? You fired your weapon while in duty or anything? So what the government has said in this court filing is that Castro was directed to return to Texas because of, and I'm quoting here, concerns for deocastros that's his title, deocastros, personal safety and the safety of other ICE officers in Minnesota. Essentially, they're saying, well, we were worried that you know he was going to be targeted, he was going to be docks, people were going to start following him around protesting. And so we decided that he should return to his home ICE office in Texas.

10:30Okay. So he returns to Texas. Meanwhile, I remember from this time, Minneapolis prosecutors were basically asking anyone with information to come forward to them, like we will investigate. So are they beginning to put together their own case here? Like are they thinking about this as something they would like to prosecute? Yeah. So what happens is that, you know, there's a sort of prolonged period of investigation by prosecutors in Hennepin County where Minneapolis is located and by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Opera Hunchen, which is sort of their state investigative agency. That is a process that takes a few months in part because the federal government has been refusing to hand over information in these cases. So both the Christian Castro case and then also in the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Prety by officers from the Department of Homeland Security. Usually, the federal government is happy to share information this time. They're not.

11:31What made this case something they could prosecute versus say what happened with Alex Prety and Renee Good? I so I spoke to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty about this and what she said is basically, it's a question of how much information was immediately available to the state of Minnesota. In the Renee Good and Alex Prety cases, the federal government kind of swept in and blocked off state investigators from accessing the evidence that they would need. And that didn't happen really in the Christian Castro case. There was more available to them that they could use to build a case. Okay, so in May, Minneapolis prosecutors file charges against Castro, he's in Texas. And my understanding is that at first things seem to be kind of normal, like Texas Rangers, arrest Castro. So it seems like, okay, maybe this guy is going to head back to Minneapolis and sort of face some sort of process for what happened there.

12:31But then when did things get weird? So what happens is that as you say, Castro is apprehended in Texas by Texas Rangers. Everything's working smoothly, right? This is sort of the normal way that things work if you can commit a crime in state A and then go to state B and governor A is sort of asking for help to get you back to state A. Texas Rangers are cooperating, Texas Minnesota cooperating on this kind of thing all the time, right? Castro is apprehended. He is held in a jail in the Bill Grande Valley, close to the US Mexico border. And the process is moving forward. I spoke to Moriarty in June and she said, you know, look, like we don't have Castro yet, but the paperwork is on, you know, Texas governor Greg Abbott's desk. So literally all it would take to have him be extradited is for the governor to just be like, yeah, sure.

13:32That's right. Huh. And is it usual at all for there to be problems with an extradition? Like if a state comes to another state and says, hey, we want to accuse this person of whatever we have evidence, how often is it that those asks are being rejected? It's extremely unusual for it to be rejected. It's handled these kinds of interstate extraditions constantly all the time, right? I mean, if you imagine like it's a big country, people cross state borders, you know, there's sometimes you end up on one state if you did something wrong in another state. It is extremely regular for this to happen. It happens between red and blue states. It's basically just a kind of normal, boring, super ministerial action that takes place. And I don't think that, you know, if you subtract the kind of political violence from all of this, I don't think there's any reason to think the Castro's case would have been anything different. Yeah. I mean, why are you so confident in that?

14:32I know that it's like, it all goes through Greg Abbott. Was he explaining his thinking here? So the reason is that Abbott actually legally has basically no leeway. There is a provision of a constitution, the extradition clause that requires that states honor these extradition requests for fugitives, essentially. If I rob a bank in state A, go to state B, state governor B has a legal obligation under the constitution and under some statutes passed by Congress to hand me back to governor A. There is just very, very little whale room here, particularly after a Supreme Court precedent in the 1980s that basically said, you don't get to make a choice here, right? This is like, you do need the governor signature to move forward, but it's not a choice that the governor is making. It's something that he has to do. And so for that reason, I think people were relatively confident that Abbott was going

15:35to sign this paperwork because he didn't have an option to not sign the paperwork, but instead what happened is that he stalled. He did this very lawyerly trick, which he was like, well, he's not a fugitive, I don't think, because he didn't flee. He was told to leave by his job, and that's not fugitive behavior. Right. And that sort of sounds like it might be convincing, but there's actually very little to it. And technically, Abbott isn't even saying, oh, he isn't a fugitive. He's saying, oh, he might not be a fugitive. And I need more time to look into this legal question and to determine whether he meets the criteria. So I can't wait in yet. But there's also like a 90-day clock in Texas, right? Exactly. And you can only hold people for three months. So you can ponder something, but only for so long. So right. So the problem is that Abbott ran out the clock. So Texas, my understanding is, is actually, it's some unusual first state to have such a hard cutoff in these kinds of extradition detention laws.

16:41But Texas does say you can be detained, well, and interstate and state and state and requires this pending for 90 days, and then they're going to let you go. And so Abbott essentially ran out those 90 days, twiddling his fingers, with no explanation really. And then at the very end of that 90 days, Minnesota sued saying, you know, yeah, we want our guy. Yeah. Then at that point, Abbott files his court filing saying, as you say, well, I don't know, he might not be a fugitive. I need to think about it. The problem with that argument is that there is actually no ambiguity about what fugitive means in this context. And it doesn't have anything to do with why you left. The point is that you left. You crossed the border. There is just nothing in the case law. One expert I spoke to Ethan Lowens, who has studied this said that there's just very little ambiguity here. And so Abbott is really, I think what you're seeing is that the governor's office is really

17:41just trying to come up with anything that they could to, you know, have an excuse for why they couldn't yet hand Castro over. Well, and meanwhile, it seems like Castro is talking to a girlfriend in Mexico about like, hey, I'd love to come move there. And we know this because of course, phone calls and jail are recorded. So it's like, you have evidence that this guy, it's not just that he might want to be a fugitive again. He might be interested in that. Right. Right. As you say, you know, there are filings from Minnesota in this case from Wells, the Abbott, where they say, look, like he's, he's talking to this woman in Mexico. He's saying that he wants to go to Mexico. He is the jail that he is in. If you look it up, it is 10 miles from the US, Mexico border. It's on the outskirts of Brown's fill. So I think the legal term would be that he's a flight risk and that there is very good reason to keep detaining him. The problem is that Abbott won't hand him over.

18:44And Texas can't detain him further. The sheriff of the jail where he's being held says, like, look, like I, you know, 90 days is up, right? Like I cannot legally keep holding him. Here's what I know, okay. All of this had to legally go to a judge, right? And it's like I can see a few things happening here. Like first you have Greg Abbott, who's Texas governor and I don't agree with what he's doing here, but it fits a pattern of behavior to me. Like Greg Abbott, same person who under Biden was like, I'm going to send my own national guard to the border. And you know, that was weird. And also the same guy who sent buses of migrants up to blues cities, you know, to kind of prove a point. So it's like this like fits a pattern of behavior. Ice, I can understand why you would want to maybe not have a case against one of your agents. You know, that makes sense to me here. The person whose behavior doesn't make sense is the judge. Like couldn't the judge have just said like, no, sorry, we got to send this person up north too bad, y'all.

19:45I think that your reaction is a reaction that a lot of people had. I saw a lot of frustration at the judge. I will say so that what the judge basically says, and this is Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr. he says, look, there is just not very much I can do here. The Texas law says 90 days, it's 90 days. I can't make Texas keep holding him. I also can't force Abbott to do anything yet because he hasn't made a decision. If Abbott had said no, then maybe the judge could have said, well, you're denying this, but you don't, you can't actually do that. So I'm going to force you. Maybe that could have happened, right? We don't know. But not making a decision is a decision. Right. The problem is that I agree. Like that is clearly what happened here. But the judge is somewhat more constrained. And when I talked to Ethan Lowens, who's the fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who's looked into a lot of these extradition laws, what he said is, you know, the judge is

20:47just kind of constrained here because there's not a lot of case law about this because governors usually work with one another in these instances. There's actually not any case where a court has had to decide, do I have the power to force a governor to hand somebody over if he's spelling? And so if you're a district judge, that kind of puts you in a box because judges never want to be the first one to say, you know, I'm breaking new ground here. You know who's not afraid of like setting precedent? Greg Abbott. Do you know what I mean? Like that's the problem. When you have one person who's like, you know, kind of bringing a knife to a gun fight, you're in trouble because Greg Abbott doesn't care. I think that's right. And I think what we see is that Abbott basically found a loophole that was created by this 90-day clock and augmented by the fact that, you know, Texas is a border state and Castro

21:48was being held right by the border and has these connections to somebody in Mexico who he admitted sort of thinks might be interested in crossing the border to live with. And so all of that can combine to create a situation where Abbott's refusal to hand Castro over is a much more dangerous situation than it might have been if, you know, he was being held in Oklahoma, right, or somewhere else that didn't have that 90-day clock, that wasn't right on the border, but that Abbott is able to kind of create this, find this loophole because of all of these different factors and then take advantage of the fact that governors have historically not tried to kind of push the limits here and that if it turns out, if you stall, you can get a lot done. We'll wear it back after a quick break.

22:51Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money. If you've ever found a good therapist, you know the relief of finally having someone who can sit with you and all your jumbled up feelings. It can feel so comforting. It can even feel like love and that can get confusing and ethically hazardous fast. For recent episode, I talked to therapists and clients about catching romantic feelings in the therapy office. I started to notice that I would really look forward to my sessions and I'm a girl that doesn't really brush my hair a whole lot and I would make sure that, you know, I look nice and all of a sudden it clicked like I had a dream one. I thought that there was some sort of weird electricity between us.

23:52You can hear that episode of Death, Sex, and Money wherever you get podcasts. Let's talk about the legal implications of what just happened here because, as you said, it doesn't seem to be a good thing once tates are just refusing extradition requests, whether they're doing that by sitting on their hands or flat out saying no. You did this helpful thing in your reporting for me where you distinguished between vertical and horizontal federalism and this sounds like so wonky, but I do want to explain it because Texas in particular is resisting both, but in different circumstances. So when Joe Biden was running the country, Greg Abbott did this thing where he would resist the federal government's authority over Texas and that is the vertical top down federalism. He basically be like, Texas doesn't have to abide by, you know what you're telling me

24:54to do. Texas can do its own thing with this national guard, et cetera, et cetera. What's happening here is a resistance to horizontal federalism, which is the agreements, the handshake agreements between the states that like we will respect each other's authority and say send someone back when there's an extradition request. Why is this distinction important? Why did you want to make sure to make it? I think it's useful as a way of conceptualizing sort of the different ways that governing structures in the United States have been placed under strain right now because of the sort of increasing politicization of what were previously very normal government functions, right? So as you say, you know, Abbott was kind of freelancing under the Biden administration in terms of Texas's border enforcement policy. There was a whole big fight not only about the national guard, but about barring off parts of the Rio Grande for people who were trying to cross when the federal government didn't

25:56want them to. And that pulls apart at the structure of the nation in terms of, you know, we have these state governments and then on top we have a federal government that unifies everything. I mean, I see this push and pull over horizontal control other places too, like take abortion law. You know, some states want to have a say over what other states do when it comes to abortion care. And this is a blue and red thing where, you know, Texas doesn't want people to go other places to seek their abortion care or get abortion pills brought into the state of Texas. Even US states like Connecticut that are passing laws that are saying, hey, we're not going to share information with you about reproductive care across borders because we believe here that reproductive care is something we want to support. And to me, it just, I like that you're fabric way of talking about it where it's like, it's like this tearing and fraying that's happening in two different directions.

26:56And like both sides are pushing and pulling. And I look at what's happening in Texas and to me, it really seems like this legalistic way to have secede from them. And I just don't know what to do with it in that regard, you know? It's definitely scary. I mean, I don't want to say, you know, this is the end of the union right here, but I do think it is part of a larger process of sort of atomization between red and blue states that is potentially really concerning. I do think that, you know, you point into abortion. I think that's a great example because there's actually a fight right now where Texas has criminally charged a doctor who's dispensing abortion medication from New York to Texas and New York is refusing to hand her over. Now, that's a different situation than Castro because this doctor in New York is actually not legally a fugitive, right?

27:56She never went to Texas in the first place. She's never left. Exactly. And now she probably won't go. So the legally, New York actually doesn't have to hand her over in the same way that Texas legally has to hand Castro over, but it does put that strain there. And I think it is concerning in so far as, you know, we see red and blue states really going different directions in a way that just makes it difficult to carry out, you know, very normal functions of governing. You know, if you take this all the way, you can imagine, you know, you rob a bank in a blue state and go to a red state and then get away with robbing the bank because the governor of the red state doesn't like the governor of the blue state. So we're in this funny moment. The reason why Castro was released was that theoretically Greg Abbott is doing an investigation into whether he was truly a fugitive and there will theoretically be some sort of finding from that investigation.

28:57And then I guess an extradition can proceed or not. Let's say Greg Abbott's investigation finds, okay, this guy was a fugitive because that's what all the legal precedents says. What will Minnesota do then? Will Minnesota be having to like track this guy down like wherever he is? Be like sending investigators into Mexico potentially to find him? Like what? What happens? So I will say that Abbott's press office told me in their statement that, and I quote, if at any time the governor determines the Castro as a fugitive, a governor's warrant will be executed immediately and law enforcement at the local state and federal levels will track him down and arrest him. So that's Abbott saying, you know, if I reach the conclusion that he's a fugitive, we will find him. If you went to Mexico, he'd be a real fugitive then, right? Right. At that point, I believe you would need the assistance of the federal government to help track him down an aspect of code to return him.

29:57And then you end up in all of the additional political complications of, you know, is this something that Trump's, just a department, Trump's Department of Homeland Security would be willing to do. So I think it is, you know, theoretically we know how that would play out, you know, but what that looks like in practical terms is much more of an open question. Do you think a blue state governor has the co-honies to do what Greg Abbott did here? Well, I think the politics are different, right? I mean, you would need to imagine, okay, what's a kind of a comparable instance where a blue state governor would face pressure to not hand somebody over? I do think that the abortion care cases are kind of comparable here. You could also imagine maybe, you know, if a doctor provided gender-framing care or something like that. Now, again, it's different because usually, and in all of the cases we've seen so far, like the New York case, these are red states trying to charge people in blue states who

31:00never actually went to the red state in the first place to carry out the alleged crime. And so the blue state governor is on much firmer footing in declining to participate. So it's a little hard for me to politically just to come up with like, what's the case that fits, you know, where someone would flee? But I mean, I think if that were to happen, you know, I think it would be a really tough situation because you can imagine how on the one hand, of course, you can imagine how there might be political pressure to resist a kind of a red state extradition effort. And I can understand where some of that anger might come from. But on the other hand, having these systems fall apart is really, really dangerous. And you know, it's not the end of the union, but it's not not a step toward a kind of chaos that makes the sort of the splintering of what we understand as the United States much,

32:02much more more likely. And so I guess my bottom line is that I will simply hope that a blue state governor will love or find themselves in that situation because that's a very dangerous place to be. Quinta, I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Quinta Jurassic is a staff writer over at the Atlantic. One last update for you. We recorded this interview on Wednesday, September 2nd. The next day, the New York Times reported that a federal grand jury indicted ice officer Christian Castro for lying about this shooting. And that could allow Christian Castro to be detained once again. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Temsdew-Sharm, and Patrick Ford. Paige Osburn is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mia Lowe Bell is the executive producer of podcast here at Slate.

33:05Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here. Next time. Hey, it's Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, and Money. If you've ever found a good therapist, you know the relief of finally having someone who can sit with you in all your jumbled up feelings. It can feel so comforting. It can even feel like love. And that can get confusing and ethically hazardous fast. For recent episode, I talked to therapists and clients about catching romantic feelings in the therapy office. I started to notice that I would really look forward to my sessions. And I'm a girl that doesn't really brush my hair a whole lot.

34:06And I would make sure that, you know, I look nice. And all of a sudden, it clicked like I had a dream one night that there was some sort of weird electricity between us. You can hear that episode of Death, Sex, and Money wherever you get podcasts.