(States Newsroom) — Two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents appear to have made untruthful statements under oath in their account of a Jan. 14 car chase that ended with one of the agents shooting a man in the leg, a senior Homeland Security official said Friday.
ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons said in a statement that both agents have been placed on leave “pending the completion of a thorough internal investigation.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office is “actively investigating these false statements,” Lyons said. The agents could get fired or be criminally prosecuted, he said. He noted that lying under oath “is a serious federal offense.”
Lyons said that video evidence reviewed by ICE and the Department of Justice had revealed that the agents appeared to have made untruthful statements, though he did not detail what evidence or what specifically was untruthful about their statements.
The statement comes the day after the DOJ moved to drop charges against Alfredo Aljorna, 26, and Julio Sosa-Celis, 24, whom they had previously accused of assaulting an ICE agent before the agent shot one of the men in the leg, citing newly discovered evidence.
The federal government has significantly shifted the details of what happened since the shooting on Jan. 14. The federal Homeland Security narrative in the immediate aftermath of the shooting incorrectly identified Sosa-Celis as the driver of the car and a subject of a “targeted traffic stop.” The complaint later indicated that the officers mistook Aljorna, who was driving the car, for another Latino man uninvolved in the incident.
At the time of the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the incident as an “attempted murder of federal law enforcement.” Similarly, Noem and other Trump administration officials accused Renee Good and Alex Pretti — also killed by federal officers — as domestic terrorists, though evidence for the allegations never surfaced.
In the original complaint, FBI agent Timothy G. Schanz said in a sworn affidavit that the ICE agent said that Sosa-Celis and Aljorna repeatedly hit him with a broom and a snow shovel. The ICE agent told the FBI that he then “simultaneously fired” one round towards the men as they began to run toward the house.
In a statement cited in the affidavit, a second ICE agent said that he saw the first agent get into a physical altercation with two men; as he was leaving his car, he said he heard a gunshot and saw the men were gone.
Aljorna and Sosa-Celis have denied the first ICE agent’s account, maintaining that they didn’t attack the ICE agent and that the agent shot Sosa-Celis in the leg through the closed door of their duplex.
Schanz’s affidavit said that law enforcement on the scene were unable to find any bullet holes in the house, though at a hearing, Sosa-Celis’ attorney showed photographs of bullet holes through the front door of the duplex and in an interior wall, the Star Tribune reported.
