ICE Agent Charged With Four Counts of Assault in Minneapolis

On Monday, Hennepin County District Court charged ICE agent Christian J. Castro over the shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Sosa-Celis on January 14—in the middle of “Operation Metro Surge”—with four counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and one count of falsely reporting a crime.

Castro had not been previously identified. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty told the Minnesota Star Tribune they found out who he was thanks to medical records from Castro, who visited a hospital right after the shooting, and an interview by state law enforcement where the shooting took place.

At the time, the federal government charged Sosa-Celis and his roommate Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna with assaulting a federal officer and posted their mug shots online. Then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused them of “attempted murder,” and DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the pair “began to resist and violently assault the officer.” McLaughlin claimed that an unnamed ICE agent, fearing for his life, had fired a defensive shot while on the ground because he was being beaten with a shovel.

Video evidence showed that in fact, Castro was standing up and shot Sosa-Celis through the closed door of his apartment, and no shovel assault took place. After an FBI special agent testified that Castro and DHS’s account was wrong, Castro and other ICE agents were placed on administrative leave and the charges against Sosa-Chelis and Aljorna were dropped.

This is the second time an ICE agent has been charged in Hennepin County for their actions during the Trump administration’s immigration offensive in Minnesota. Last month, agent Donnell Morgan Jr. was charged with two counts of second-degree assault for allegedly pointing a weapon at drivers. But there still haven’t been charges filed over the two highest-profile ICE-related deaths from the operation, those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

“It’s just a very unique scenario,” Moriarty told the Star Tribune. “We obviously are trying to be very thoughtful and intentional. While I understand people really want accountability and they saw what they saw in the [Good and Pretti] videos, this is incredibly complex. The last thing we want to do is make a mistake if we feel something is appropriately charged and get dismissed out of federal court.”

Moriarty added that the federal government’s refusal to share even basic information with local and state agencies about Good and Pretti’s deaths hasn’t helped investigators. In March, Minnesota state prosecutors sued the federal government to force their hand.

“Think about how unprecedented that is,” Moriarty said. “The federal government won’t even give us the identification of the shooters.”

President Trump’s newly minted MAGA slush fund comes with a massive disclaimer that serves to absolve the administration of any future crimes their allies may commit with the taxpayer money.

The “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” approved Monday, contains roughly $1.8 billion for anyone who felt unfairly targeted by the Biden administration— from January 6 rioters, to right-wing think tanks, to the president’s own super PAC. The fund also notes that once these groups have received their money the Trump administration has “no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

This disclaimer allows Trump to wash his hands preemptively while this billion dollar fund will very well likely go to folks who were convicted of unlawful entry, assault, and seditious conspiracy. Some of those people have already committed crimes since they received their mass pardon from Trump.

“[This] seems like an exceptionally bad idea to give to people notoriously known for committing crimes,” the Ways and Means Committee Democrats wrote on X.

The White House is replacing a space known for protests with a parking lot for a month of major national events—including Donald Trump’s birthday.

Over the weekend, a pedestrianized stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square Park was painted with yellow lines denoting parking spaces. The area has served as a viewing spot for tourists and a gathering place for protesters for two decades.

The White House said the parking lot will last through June 28 in order to accommodate several events on the grounds for the country’s 250th anniversary.

Next month, Trump’s birthday plans include “UFC Freedom 250,” which apparently means a pricey UFC fight on the White House’s South Lawn and a “fan fest” at the Ellipse. It’s the same spot where Trump once urged his followers to “fight like hell” before they stormed the U.S. Capitol. In late June, the Great American State Fair will be held at the nearby National Mall.

Lafayette Square Park, another protest spot, has been closed for months for a “major rehabilitation” and is expected to reopen on May 31, according to the National Parks Service.

It seems clear that the president, who regularly lashes out against critics, isn’t interested in getting any more angry feedback from Americans.

There’s reason to suspect that this change may not be temporary, as the Trump administration hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about the president’s other renovation plans.

The price tag for Trump’s White House ballroom skyrocketed from $200 million in private donations to $400 million, before Republicans decided to throw $1 billion sourced from American taxpayers at the project. Trump claimed last July that the project would not “interfere with the current building,” but then demolished the entire East Wing.

Fox News thinks that escalating the war in Iran is the best way to end the conflict.

On Fox and Friends Monday morning, Brian Kilmeade called for sending American troops to seize Iran’s enriched uranium, seizing the Strait of Hormuz, and targeting the “bad actors that have been insincerely negotiating with our group.”

“The best chance for no casualties is you open up four different fronts immediately, simultaneously, with an army that hasn’t been paid, with the IRGC, which is being also hurt,” Kilmeade said.

Resuming attacks on Iran in this way would likely produce a response from Iran and increase the chance of U.S. military casualties. Kilmeade has no military experience or expertise on the Middle East, but being on Fox News carries weight: Trump is an avid watcher, and could very easily take this as a viable option.

Later on Monday, Trump made a long-winded post on Truth Social complaining about media coverage of the Iran war, mentioning “The Failing New York Times, The China Street Journal (WSJ!), Corrupt and now Irrelevant CNN, and all other members of the Fake News Media” and claiming that even if Iran totally surrendered, the media would say it had defeated the U.S.

Trump didn’t mention Fox News in his rant, and the network continues to support the war even as other right-wing personalities have come out against it. It’s not clear what he’ll do, but the president won’t take any option that makes him look bad, even if it divides his base and is the best way forward.

Tens of thousands of children have been separated from their families during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to a new analysis by the Brookings Institution.

The report, released Monday, suggests that more than 145,000 children have been separated from their parents since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an astronomical projection that far eclipses the estimated 5,500 separations that occurred during Trump’s wildly controversial “zero tolerance” policy in his first administration, reported The New York Times.

Three-quarters of those children are likely U.S. citizens, a detail that could be contributing to the previously under-reported figures, since immigrant parents are not being asked about, nor disclosing, their American-born children, according to the report.

Federal immigration agents are required to ask about the parental status of those taken into custody, as per the guidelines described in the ICE Detained Parent Directive. But anecdotal evidence obtained by the Brookings Institution suggests that they rarely do. Further still, other firsthand accounts reveal that some immigrants fear mentioning their children at all, for fear of adverse consequences for their families.

That’s caused a lack of reliable data regarding how many detainees or deportees actually have U.S. citizen children. It’s also caused a lack of reliable data regarding what happens to the children after their parents are taken into custody, according to the report.

Around 60,000 people are currently in ICE detention, according to official data. The Trump administration has arrested some 400,000 immigrants over the last year and a half.

The Department of Homeland Security has provided statistics showing 18,277 detainees with U.S. citizen children in fiscal year 2025, but that number “is almost certainly a substantial undercount,” reads the Brookings report.

To determine their own numbers, the Brookings Institution used an alternative approach that inferred the number of children based on the known demographic data of adult detainees obtained from the Detention Data Project, matching the detainees’ country, age, sex, and marital status to likely undocumented immigrants that participated in a national survey.

“This exercise implies that about 27 percent of detainees are the co-residential parent of a minor child, and 20 percent have citizen children in the home,” reads the report. “Using this method, coupled with an estimate of 400,000 detentions from interior arrests between January 20, 2025 and April 9, 2026, we estimate the total number of children affected by parental detention to be around 205,000 and the number of U.S. citizen children affected to be around 145,000.”

Those numbers are expected to grow given the $45 billion that Congress allocated via Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill to expand the country’s detention capabilities.

Exactly where all those children have gone—or who is watching over them—is not as clear. Researchers estimated that just a small fraction of the separated children end up in the foster care system, or under similar arrangements.

“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care—most children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” Dr. Maria Cancian, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and one of the co-authors of the study, told the Times.

The vast majority of parent-child separations spurred by the federal government are rarely temporary—a ProPublica study that examined ICE arrests of mothers of U.S.-born children found that 60 percent had been removed from the country, while 17 percent remained in custody by the end of study itself.