The federal government charges the ICE officer with lying, while the Justice Department blocks the more serious charge over the shooting

Federal prosecutors have charged ICE officer Christian Castro because he allegedly lied to investigators about the shooting that injured a Venezuelan man during the immigration raids in Minneapolis earlier this year. On paper, the charge is making false statements, while the bullet in Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis’s leg moves into the background. The federal indictment remains under seal for now. That is how a case begins in which talking about the act carries more weight than the act itself. A justice system that turns the bullet into a side issue and the words about it into the main issue reveals what it holds sacred. The charge is about the sentence he spoke, not the finger on the trigger.

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What happened is on the record in Minnesota. Authorities there accuse the 52-year-old Castro of firing through the front door of a house in January and shooting Sosa-Celis in the thigh. Before that, he and another officer allegedly chased a man named Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna to a duplex where he lived with Sosa-Celis. Afterward, the officer allegedly falsely accused Sosa-Celis and another man of attacking an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel. The broom and the shovel were the invention meant to turn the people who were shot at into the attackers. A household item is declared a weapon so the shooting can pass as self-defense. The fiction was supposed to carry what the act itself could not.

Video footage blew the story apart. The camera saw what the report left out. After the footage suggested that the officers may have lied about the incident, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against the two men and opened an investigation. This week, a federal prosecutor involved in the case told lawyers for those affected that the Justice Department had blocked his attempt to bring a more serious civil rights charge against the officer, according to consistent reports. A person familiar with the case disputes that account: The civil rights investigation is continuing, and no final decision has been made on additional charges. Prosecutor Matthew Evans was fired on Thursday and is now suspected of obstructing a grand jury investigation; his official email account says he is on leave. The prosecutor becomes the accused in his own case. The man in the dock is the one who wanted to pursue the shooter, while the shooter is already out. That is how the roles are reversed, quietly and in full compliance with procedure.

The federal indictment comes after Castro’s release last week. Texas Governor Greg Abbott had refused to immediately sign the extradition warrant to Minnesota, where Castro is charged with assault and filing a false crime report in the same case. Abbott cited investigations into fraud involving social service programs in Minnesota, which Donald Trump had used to justify his crackdown on immigrants there. When a federal judge declined to force Texas to extradite him, Castro walked free. A fraud allegation in an unrelated matter thus became a free pass. A governor who delays extradition turns federalism into a hiding place. Federal law and state law stood against each other, and the accused used the gap.

He had been arrested in May and held in Brownsville near the Mexican border while Minnesota sought his extradition. Authorities there tried to stop the Cameron County sheriff from releasing him because they feared he might flee to Mexico; according to a lawsuit filed by Minnesota, Castro spoke while in custody about marrying a woman and buying a house in Mexico after his release. The Department of Homeland Security called Minnesota’s prosecution “unlawful and nothing more than a political stunt” and said only the federal government had jurisdiction. An officer dreaming about marriage and a house across the border while he was under investigation was apparently no reason for urgency. The concern was his departure, not the man who was shot.

Castro had already been suspended without pay in February while the federal government investigated. Then-acting ICE Director Todd Lyons spoke of the highest standards to which the agency’s men and women were held and said violations of “this sacred sworn oath” would not be tolerated, while ICE remained committed to “transparency, accountability and the fair enforcement” of the law. The sacred oath here serves as a wreath laid over a process it cannot cover. What accountability was supposed to mean ends as a formula. The bullet becomes a footnote, the charge is lying. The man who wanted a tougher investigation is now himself under suspicion. The federal government protects its man, the state cannot get him, and the man who was shot is left with a wound and a case number.