Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem quickly offered a variation of her standard falsehood.
She had said the same after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, an unarmed mother of three, a week earlier on Jan. 7. And she would repeat it regarding the killing of VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti on Jan. 24.
“Fearing for his life, he fired a defensive shot,” Noem said of her agent.
She told the press that the delivery driver incident constituted “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.”
“Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” she added.
That falsehood was more elaborate than the others, but received less attention because the person shot in this case, Venezuelan Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, 24, only suffered a wound to his right thigh and survived.
Sosa-Celis was arrested along with his friend andfellow DoorDasher, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, who allegedly joined in assaulting the agent after a car chase ended in a struggle outside of his home.
But a bullet hole in the front door of their home corroborates contradictory accounts by two eyewitnesses. They say the agent fired through the door, and Sosa-Celis was struck after he entered the house, so he could not have constituted a threat. The bullet was later found to have torn through the door and into the apartment.
The bullet was found “between a child’s bed and a crib,” Aljorna’s attorney, Frederick Goetz, told the Daily Beast on Friday.
Goetz said two children, ages 1 and 3, were in the apartment at the time. The older one could be seen in a live video Sosa-Celis and his wife, Indriany Mendoza Camacho, made as they called 911 to report in Spanish that he had been shot “by ICE” when he was inside.
“They shot through the door,” Camacho said in Spanish.
In a subsequent statement, she reported that her husband was not even the man that ICE had been chasing for fleeing a car stop. The agent had, in fact, been after fellow Venezuelan Aljorna, 26, who was arrested outside the home.
Aljorna’s partner, Valentina De Los Angeles Tiapa Moreno, was inside the home and had watched the incident unfold alongside Camacho. Sosa-Celis, the two women, and the children then sought refuge in an upstairs bedroom, but ICE drove them out with tear gas.
A number of area residents had gathered outside the home and were loudly expressing their displeasure when ICE sought to scatter them with more tear gas.
It seeped into the home of a neighbor whose six-month-old baby began to have difficulty breathing.
The neighbor took the baby out to his car only for agents to toss flash bangs under it, causing the airbags to inflate. The baby ended up going by ambulance to an emergency room, but thankfully survived.
In the meantime, ICE arrested both Aljorna and the wounded Sosa-Celis. An FBI criminal complaint charged them with “aiding and abetting the forcible assault, resistance, and impeding of a federal law enforcement officer.” ICE, which had been routinely barging private property in Minneapolis without search warrants, reported that the lack of one kept them from collecting the bullet.
ICE used the same excuse for not vouchering the supposed “ambush” weapons, the broomstick and the snow shovel, which ultimately proved to be plastic.
ICE also arrested the two women who had witnessed it all from inside the house. They and the two young children were flown out of Minneapolis the next morning.
“To Texas and other places,” Goetz reported.
But both women managed to file habeas corpus petitions seeking their release and return to Minneapolis. The petitions were filed under seal but were viewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which reported that the documents contain detailed eyewitness accounts of the incident. The report revealed that the women watched an unnamed ICE agent punch and choke Aljorna. Sosa-Celis sought to help his friend.
“Seeing Alfredo in danger, Julio intervened and attempted to separate Alfredo from the man beating him and choking him — pulling on Alfredo towards the house to get him away from his attacker,” a petition says. “At no time did either Alfredo or Julio use or threaten to use a weapon, nor wield any object that could be deployed as a weapon, against the man assaulting Alfredo.”
The women say in their petitions that a child was in the room when Sosa-Celis was shot. Contrary to Noem’s initial statements regarding the encounter, the occupants were the ones truly afraid for their lives when they sought safety in an upstairs bedroom.
“Valentina and the other occupants of the home begged the agents not to kill them and said they would surrender,” one petition reports. “Still, when the agents entered the room, they trained their guns on Indriany, who was holding her child, and the others.”
The petitions were filed in Minneapolis federal court. The respondent is listed in court papers as David Easterwood, the acting director of the St. Paul ICE field office. He is also a pastor at Cities Church in nearby St. Paul, Minnesota. Journalist Don Lemon and several other people were later arrested after protesters interrupted a service there on Jan. 18.
The assembled protesters, whom Lemon was covering in his capacity as a journalist, named Easterwood’s role with ICE as the reason for their demonstration. Lemon appeared in Minneapolis federal court on Friday and pleaded not guilty to charges related to his arrest.
In the meantime, the women have been returned to Minneapolis. By all indications, they are ready to offer their accounts in the same courthouse should the case come to trial. The prospect of their testimony, combined with video of the incident and the bullet hole in the door, prompted the U.S. Attorney’s office to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be reinstated.
In other Minneapolis cases where Noem and fellow Trump administration officials were proven wrong, they nonetheless stuck by falsehoods perpetrated by ICE agents. That was in keeping with precedents set during ICE operations in Los Angeles and Chicago.
During the Minneapolis operation, numerous videos appeared online showing federal agents behaving in ways that would have made them liable to charges in any responsible police department. The agents appeared to be acting with impunity, or, as JD Vance said last month, with “absolute immunity.”
But the initial lies against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna were countered by so much truth that the immunity proved to have limits. ICE announced on Friday that it was taking disciplinary action against the agent who fired the shot and the partner who backed up his account.
“Today, 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,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a statement. “Both officers have been immediately placed on administrative leave pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation.”
Lyons continued, “Lying under oath is a serious federal offense. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is actively investigating these false statements. Upon conclusion of the investigation, the officers may face termination of employment, as well as potential criminal prosecution.”
Lyons then veered from the truth himself.
“The men and women of ICE are entrusted with upholding the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and ethical conduct,” he said. “Violations of this sacred sworn oath will not be tolerated.”
What had made this case different from other violent encounters members of the public have had with immigration agents was the magnitude of the evidence contradicting ICE’s narrative, including the bullet hole in the front door that struck a man who posed no threat and could have itself proven deadly as it continued between a child’s bed and a crib.
“This was a rock-solid case of innocence,” Goetz said.
