Surveillance Footage Destroys ICE's "Attempted Murder" Lie in Minneapolis Shooting

The Trump administration's story about ICE agents heroically defending themselves from a violent "ambush" in Minneapolis just collapsed under the weight of actual evidence. Surveillance footage released Monday by the City of Minneapolis reveals that federal agents fabricated their account of shooting 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in January -- and that prosecutors charged two men with crimes based on lies they never bothered to verify.

The shooting happened during Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign in Minneapolis that resulted in over 4,000 arrests. On January 14, ICE agents shot Sosa-Celis in the leg during an encounter outside a North Minneapolis home. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem -- the "ICE Barbie" who Trump fired last month after public backlash to fatal raids -- immediately spun the incident as an "attempted murder of federal law enforcement."

Noem claimed the officer "was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms" and that he fired "a defensive shot" because he "feared for his life and safety." The Justice Department charged Sosa-Celis and his cousin Alfredo A. Aljorna based on sworn statements from two ICE agents describing this violent assault.

There's just one problem: it never happened.

The nine-minute surveillance video, captured by a city-owned camera at a nearby intersection, shows exactly what occurred on that snow-covered street. Aljorna gets out of a car -- agents had run the plates and discovered it was registered to someone else -- and falls to the ground. An ICE agent tackles him. Sosa-Celis, holding a snow shovel, tries to pull his cousin free from the agent's grip.

Here's what the video does NOT show: anyone being beaten with a shovel. Anyone wielding a broom handle as a weapon. Any "ambush" of federal officers. The shovel is visible on the pavement during the 12-second struggle, never used as a weapon. Both men then run toward the house. The ICE agent fires, hitting Sosa-Celis in the right thigh as he flees.

"It sounds like an unarmed person got shot running away," Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara told The New York Times after reviewing the footage.

The federal government had access to this video almost immediately after the shooting. Minneapolis police provided it to prosecutors. But here's where the story gets even uglier: prosecutors didn't actually watch the surveillance footage until almost three weeks after filing charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna. Instead, they relied entirely on the ICE agent's statement and an FBI affidavit describing the video.

They took the agents at their word. The agents lied.

"Bare due diligence would have shown that the agents were lying," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said after viewing the footage for the first time. In a statement to CNN, Frey added that the video "makes it crystal clear that, just like in other situations during Operation Metro Surge, the federal government's account of what happened simply does not match the facts."

The Justice Department quietly dropped all charges against both men in February. ICE placed two agents on administrative leave. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons confirmed in a statement that "video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements."

Translation: federal agents committed perjury to justify shooting an unarmed man in the back.

The DHS has not named the officers involved or provided any update on the status of its investigation. When contacted by The Daily Beast on Monday, the agency simply resent February's statement saying the officers "may face termination of employment, as well as potential criminal prosecution" after the investigation concludes. No timeline. No accountability. Just bureaucratic boilerplate.

Meanwhile, Sosa-Celis survived his gunshot wound and continues fighting the Trump administration's attempt to deport him. Both he and Aljorna were initially jailed in Minnesota while their partners were sent to an ICE detention center outside El Paso. Judges eventually ordered the women be allowed to return to Minneapolis, but the deportation proceedings continue.

The shooting occurred during the same Operation Metro Surge that killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, and sparked major protests in Minneapolis that police dispersed with chemical irritants. The mounting civilian casualties and evidence of federal misconduct eventually became too much even for Trump, who fired Noem last month despite claiming she had "served us well." He shuffled her into a newly invented role he called "Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas" -- a meaningless title for a disgraced official.

This case reveals the rot at the heart of Trump's deportation machine. Federal agents lied under oath. Prosecutors filed charges without reviewing available evidence. A young man was shot while running away, then smeared as a violent criminal who "ambushed" law enforcement. The administration's top officials amplified those lies to justify increasingly brutal enforcement tactics.

And it all would have stood if Minneapolis hadn't released the video that proved every word was false.