A Minnesota Prosecutor Investigated an ICE Officer for Civil Rights Crimes. He Was Fired and the Charge Got Downgraded.

The federal prosecutor who spent months building a civil rights case against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minnesota has been fired, and the charge that officer finally faced this week was a far smaller one than the case he was building.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans had been investigating ICE officer Christian Castro over the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant wounded earlier this year. Evans was examining whether Castro violated Sosa-Celis's constitutional rights — the federal civil rights statute that carries the heaviest penalties for law enforcement misconduct. Instead, according to people familiar with the matter, Evans was instructed to bring only a false-statements charge over what Castro said about the incident. Castro was charged this week. The indictment remains sealed.

In an email reviewed by ProPublica and described to CBS News, Evans told other attorneys what had happened. "This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney," he wrote. "I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn't enough." CBS News said it has not independently obtained the email.

Evans is now himself under investigation by the Justice Department, according to three people familiar with it. Two of them said the inquiry centers on alleged leaking.

Castro is not a new name in Minnesota. He was charged in May with four counts of assault over a January shooting in which he fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home, and he was arrested in Texas later that month. The case has sat at the center of a larger fight over whether federal immigration officers can be held to the same standard as any other armed government employee who shoots someone.

The sequence — a line prosecutor pursuing a civil rights charge, an instruction from Washington to charge something lesser, and then the prosecutor's removal — lands in the middle of a year in which the Justice Department has repeatedly stepped between local prosecutors and immigration enforcement officers. The department has separately warned states they risk losing billions in welfare funding if they decline to report immigrants living in the country illegally, and it has intervened in other cases involving ICE personnel.

What makes the Minnesota matter unusual is that the disagreement was written down. Federal civil rights prosecutions of officers are rare and hard to win; they require proof that an officer acted willfully to deprive someone of a constitutional right. A false-statements count, by contrast, asks a jury only whether a person lied to investigators. Both can send someone to prison. Only one of them says the government believes a shooting was unconstitutional.

Neither the Justice Department nor the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota has explained publicly why the charging decision went the way it did, or why Evans no longer works there. Castro's sealed indictment means the underlying allegations against him have not yet been made public in full.