ICE Agent Charged in Minnesota Shooting Set Free in Texas

An ICE agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis in January has been released from a Texas jail with no clear indication as to the future of his charges.

Christian Castro was one of thousands of agents that descended upon Minnesota during Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. On January 14, Castro allegedly chased Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, a DoorDash driver, to the entryway of his home. Upon arriving at the residence, Castro shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Castro claimed at the time that he shot Sosa-Celis in self-defense, purporting that the Venezuelan national had attacked him with a snow shovel.

But even Trump’s Justice Department had a difficult time proving that one. In a rare reversal, the DOJ moved to dismiss charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna relating to the assault, and Castro was the one left facing criminal consequences. Surveillance footage of the encounter released in April showed Sosa-Celis tossing the shovel early into his exchange with the ICE agent, and Castro firing shots into the home.

By mid-May, a Minneapolis state court charged Castro with four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, issuing a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Days later, Texas Rangers cuffed Castro in Cameron County. He remained in jail until Thursday.

But the ensuing extradition process would prove to be a tumultuous one. Defying historical precedent, Texas Governor Greg Abbott opted not to comply with the warrant and hand Castro over to Minnesotan authorities. Abbott questioned whether the agent qualified as a fugitive since Castro had not technically fled Minnesota but had rather been transferred to work in Texas by the Department of Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. refused to force the extradition, despite fears that Castro would evade further capture by fleeing to Mexico.

“Governor Abbott still has the ability to prevent Christian Castro from walking out of jail. He can choose to stop harboring a fugitive by simply signing the extradition paperwork today,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement following the decision. “If Castro walks out of jail tomorrow and disappears into Mexico, it will be the fault of one person—Greg Abbott.”

By 7 a.m. on Thursday, Castro’s detention had hit the maximum limit for a pending extradition as set by Texas law, and he was released.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wants Republican state leaders to stay away from any regulation of prediction markets. 

The New York Times reports that Trump told a gathering of GOP state attorneys general in New Orleans this spring that gambling businesses were attacking prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi to protect their own “monopolies.” Prediction markets already have oversight from the federal government, Trump said, according to four anonymous sources cited by the Times. 

The message appeared clear: Back off the idea of regulating any prediction markets.

Trump was hired by Kalshi in January last year as an adviser and is on the board of Polymarket, which he has a stake in through his investment firm 1789 Capital.  

Both Republican and Democratic state governments are pursuing legal action against prediction markets, with 20 states in litigation over whether prediction markets fall under sports gambling laws. In July, 44 states signed a letter calling prediction markets a “new form of casino” endangering young people. In March, Arizona became the first state to criminally charge Kalshi for allowing people to bet on elections and “operating an illegal gambling business.”  

States are trying to recoup state tax revenue, estimated to be at least $2 billion a year, according to the research group the Tax Foundation. The president, meanwhile, is encouraging prediction markets, touting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small agency that oversees derivatives, as being enough to regulate them. 

Since its founding in 1974, the CFTC had never sued a state government over regulations until this year, when it sued nine of them, all with Democratic governors. In two instances, the CFTC has told prediction markets to go around court orders by invoking emergency powers. 

The issue of prediction markets will likely reach the Supreme Court, with the White House highly likely to back the businesses from facing any legal restrictions. The fact that they involve betting on political and international events has already proven to be a major problem, but that doesn’t seem to deter the Trump administration. 

President Donald Trump wants you to pretend that he’s on the ballot in the midterm elections.

Speaking in an interview aired on Fox News’s Hannity Wednesday night, Trump explained his latest strategy to get out the vote in November.

“There’s a theory that I get the vote,” Trump said. “You know, I see it all the time. ‘When Trump’s on the ballot, they win. When he’s not on the ballot, the people don’t go to vote.’ And I’m asking the people through your brilliant show, number one show, I’m asking the people to get out and vote, pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Trump’s remarks come as he’s directed MAGA Inc. to spend his $400 million elections war chest on ads that focus not on the Republican candidates who are running for the House and Senate, but on the president himself.

But Trump’s new approach to the midterm elections only works if people actually like him—and right now, they don’t.

In recent days, Trump’s approval rating has held at 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency. A poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that Trump’s war with Iran—a conflict that has come to define the first half of his second term—is even less popular, with an approval rating of just 31 percent.

Trump may have been a boost on a ballot before, but this time around, voters are watching his record fall apart. A recent poll published by Strength in Numbers/Verasight found that Trump was underwater on all issues across the board—including border security, which is historically his best issue.

Democrats were hoping to malign Republican candidates for the House and Senate by linking them to Trump—and now those candidates won’t be able to escape him. If this is seriously the president’s best strategy, Democrats may be in for a treat come November.

“Poetry is not sexual misconduct,” writes disgraced North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards.

The congressman released a rambling 22-page letter to his House colleagues Tuesday detailing all the ways in which he was not a creep while using his position of power to make two young women in his employ feel uncomfortable at work. The letter follows a 25-page report from the House Ethics Committee that recommended Edwards be censured following “substantial evidence” that he violated House rules related to “sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.” Backlash from the report ultimately forced Edwards to pull out of his race for reelection.

Still, Edwards attempted to clear his name with his colleagues, as NOTUS first reported. In the letter, Edwards tries to argue that what the two women reported as harassment was just chummy boss-employee camaraderie, going on to bizarrely claim that “something that could be interpreted as romantic is worlds apart from establishing an unwanted sexual advance.” [Emphasis is Edwards’s.]

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition. A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct.

“Friendship is not misconduct,” Edwards’s letter continues. “Generosity is not misconduct. Social interaction is not misconduct. Caring deeply about colleagues who have become important parts of your life is not misconduct. And conduct does not become sexual harassment merely because someone looking backward through thousands of pages can construct a theory under which it ‘could be interpreted as romantic.’”

Among the inappropriate actions listed in the committee’s original report, Edwards paid for expensive gifts and lavish vacations; he tearfully read an original poem at one staff member’s going-away party; he hired a singer to perform Ed Sheeran’s ‘Hills of Aberfeldy’ for her on her birthday; and he sent a trove of long, gushing messages to both staffers. Edwards also regularly commented on the two women’s appearance, calling them “pretty” and “breathtaking,” including comments like, “That’s a great looking dress, I like that color, I like that texture.”

In one staffer’s testimony for the committee, she explained that Edwards ignored “the fact that [she is] a young female in politics and that [her] image is everything. And while he can navigate rumors like those that are circulating now without concern because he is, I guess, a male in politics, he had no regard for how something like this could impact my career.”

Edwards will not remain a sitting member of Congress for long, so this letter looks like an attempt to save his reputation. Unfortunately for the congressman, the evidence speaks for itself.

Poetry is not sexual misconduct. But poetry written by your boss who thinks you’re “pretty,” read aloud at your going-away party, followed by a slideshow, followed by him bursting into tears in front of your co-workers … that might cross the line.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied to the Senate about his 2019 trip to Samoa.

During two separate confirmation hearings last year, America’s foremost anti-vaccine activist claimed that his trek to the Polynesian island country had “nothing to do with vaccines.” Fact check: It did.

Letters obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, published Thursday, reveal that Kennedy explicitly informed the Samoan prime minister ahead of his trip of his intention to study the efficacy of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine.

In one such letter dated January 20, 2019, Kennedy unambiguously argued that he believed two recent infant deaths on the island were “temporally associated with MMR vaccines.”

“For most of the world, investigation of adverse health events associated with vaccines—or any pharmaceutical for that matter—is both difficult and time consuming,” Kennedy wrote. “Health information systems are rarely designed to support rapid study of associations between diagnoses and specific vaccination events.

“It is, however, known that vaccines vary both lot-to-lot from specific manufacturers, and between manufacturers for a single vaccine type,” he continued. “This makes the likelihood of adverse lot and manufacturer specific effects higher for smaller nations where all vaccines can be from a few or a single lot and manufacturer.”

Kennedy’s visit preceded a deadly measles outbreak on the island in 2019. At the time, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout Samoa, tanking the nation’s vaccination rate from a 60 percent–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

Up until that point, Samoa had not experienced a severe measles outbreak since 1985, when 1,095 confirmed cases were reported to the World Health Organization. But in 2019, after Kennedy’s visit, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

During his confirmation hearings in February 2025, Kennedy repeatedly told skeptical lawmakers that his visit had “nothing to do with vaccines” and was actually focused on implementing public health systems that would digitize Samoan health records.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told The Guardian in a statement that “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines.”

The spokesperson added that “any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” despite the fact that Kennedy was not sworn in under oath before his congressional hearings.

However, that didn’t grant Kennedy the ability and free license to lie to America’s lawmakers: It’s a felony to make false statements to or conceal facts from the federal government, as detailed by U.S. Code.