You’ve no doubt heard that Governor Greg Abbott is harboring a suspected criminal, Christian Castro, the ICE officer accused by the State of Minnesota of shooting Venezuelan TPS recipient Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis and then lying about it to the FBI, framing his victim and Sosa-Celis’ roommate with assaulting him.
In a lawsuit attempting to force Texas to turn over the suspected assailant, Minnesota argued that Castro is a flight risk, based in significant part on the 394 calls Castro placed from jail to a Mexican woman presumed to be his lover, where he described moving to Progreso, Mexico where they could live in a big house together.
Governor Abbott has dicked around with the extradition request, and so Castro was released today after 90 days in jail.
Castro is just one of a small gang of Latino Texans whom Stephen Miller sent to invade Minnesota in January who allegedly engaged in violence or other crime.
As ProPublica reported in February, the two men who shot and killed Alex Pretti are Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, both from South Texas.
The two federal immigration agents who fired on Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti are identified in government records as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.
The records viewed by ProPublica list Ochoa, 43, and Gutierrez, 35, as the shooters during the deadly encounter last weekend that left Pretti dead and ignited massive protests and calls for criminal investigations.
Both men were assigned to Operation Metro Surge, an immigration enforcement dragnet launched in December that sent scores of armed and masked agents across the city.
[snip]
Ochoa is a Border Patrol agent who joined CBP in 2018. Gutierrez joined in 2014 and works for CBP’s Office of Field Operations. He is assigned to a special response team, which conducts high-risk operations like those of police SWAT units. Records show both men are from South Texas.
As Pretti’s family explained to George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, they still have gotten no accountability for the shooting.
As CBP officers from south Texas, Ochoa and Gutierrez are from the same agency and same part of Texas as Marco Antonio Muniz, the Border Patrol officer who testified in May about the false arrest on January 20 of naturalized Somali-American Mohamed Jama.
Q. You mentioned a river. Where do you currently work?
A. I work in Laredo, Texas, southern border.
Q. Now, prior to your —
THE COURT: Sorry. Just — the river you’re referring to is the Rio Grande?
At least two more of the officers involved in this false arrest were Latino, including Angel Flores, whose phone did a search earlier that day (at one point, Muniz was doing searches on Flores’ phone, because Flores was driving) and discovered the owner of the van that CBP would unlawfully pursue hours later in rental SUVs with license plates from Texas was an American citizen.
Notably, these requests for a “check” of the records were timestamped at 9:15 and 9:20 a.m. – approximately two hours before Agent Berger and Agent Muniz testified that the incident began. Both Berger and Muniz testified that agents first encountered the Defendant’s vehicle at approximately 11:00 or 11:15 a.m. (ECF No. 58, Mot. Hrg. Tr. at 49; ECF No. 1-1 at ¶ 5.) Based on the body-worn camera videos that have been produced, the first agent to choose to activate his camera did so around 12:20 p.m., about one hour after agents said they first encountered the Defendant’s vehicle.
A person on the Teams chat responded to Agent Flores’s “check” at 9:22 a.m. – still hours before the agents testified that the incident began. The responses conclusively demonstrated that the registered owner of the van was a U.S. Citizen. The first response listed the registered owner’s “COC” – i.e. country of citizenship – as “USA”:
(Ex. 3.) The second “check” response provided further detail, along with a photograph matching the Super Query record, showing that the registered owner was a U.S. citizen with a U.S. Passport:
Thus, Agent Flores knew that the owner of the vehicle was a U.S. Citizen before he told his fellow agents to stop and then pursue the driver of the vehicle.
As Jama’s attorney, Surya Saxena, laid out in a successful bid for a hearing currently scheduled for next week, both Muniz (in his testimony) and Flores (in his claims to Richard Berger, to get an arrest affidavit) lied about Jama.
Agent Berger either intentionally provided false testimony regarding the registered owner’s immigration status or he was mislead by Agent Flores. In either instance, one or both of the Agents’ dishonesty should be documented for purposes of later Giglio disclosures. These agents should not be allowed to testify in future proceedings or affidavits without their prior dishonesty being recognized by the Court and disclosed to future defendants.
Agent Muniz also testified that he personally looked that the Teams chat records checks and personally concluded that the registered owner was not a U.S. citizen. In light of the clear records shared on the Teams chat demonstrating that the registered owner was a U.S. citizen, the Court should confirm that Muniz also provided false testimony.
About a month after arresting Jama, DOJ asked for a protective order to hide the identities of what it called the “victims” in the Jama case — something DOJ did not consistently do in the Minnesota cases. While Saxena successfully pushed back on that order (the government withdrew its request to avoid a hearing on the matter), it otherwise would have hidden Muniz and Flores’ identity, along with the other two guys in their SUV and the four in the SUV that caused a collision with the van Jama was driving.
It’s almost as if DOJ wanted to hide the extent to which Stephen Miller sent a masked gang of violent Latinos from South Texas to invade Minnesota, where they murdered, shot, kidnapped, and defamed Miller’s targets, just as Miller himself defamed Alex Pretti after the ICU nurse’s death.
It’s enough to make you sick!
Which brings me to the last Latino criminal I know of that Miller sent from South Texas to invade Minnesota, Alfredo Mancillas Jr, who drove drunk into a parking lot in St. Paul on January 26 and vomited all over himself.
A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol employee was charged with drunken driving in St. Paul after a state trooper found him passed out in a car Tuesday morning “covered in vomit.”
The state trooper found 31-year-old Alfredo Mancillas Jr. of Corpus Christi, Texas, “slumped over in the driver’s seat” at 3:25 a.m. Tuesday in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood near Allianz Field, according to charges filed that day by the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office.
His car was parked in a no-parking zone and smelled like alcohol while Mancillas himself had “bloodshot and watery eyes,” the charges allege.
Mancillas, at least, pled guilty last month, though will escape his 90-day prison sentence if he avoids trouble for a year.
This is just what we know of, though. If we counted all the three dozen false arrests as kidnapping and, in many cases, assault, Stephen Miller’s rap sheet would be far longer — and the list of suspected criminals from South Texas would likely grow.
And Governor Abbott would probably happy harbor those criminals, too.
