Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of making Texas a “sanctuary state for violent criminals” after an ICE agent charged in a Minneapolis shooting was released while Abbott weighed whether to send him back north.
Christian Castro, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, left a south Texas jail Thursday after a federal judge refused Minnesota’s emergency request to keep him detained and compel Abbott to sign an extradition warrant.
Ellison said Abbott’s delay was bigger than one case.
“This is not politics — this is not a game,” Ellison said after Castro’s release.
“If a governor can delay extraditions and cherry-pick cases according to their political tastes, then no state will be able to hold fugitive criminals accountable.”
ICE OFFICER CHRISTIAN CASTRO RELEASED AFTER JUDGE DENIES MINNESOTA EXTRADITION REQUEST
ICE officer Christian Castro has been RELEASED from a Brownsville, Texas detention center after a Trump-appointed federal judge denied Minnesota’s request to force Texas to extradite him to… pic.twitter.com/VTYJoIlWpM
— Trumpusa1 (@Trumpusa1A1) August 27, 2026
On X, Ellison put the accusation in starker terms. “Greg Abbott is turning Texas into a sanctuary state for violent criminals,” Ellison wrote, accusing Abbott of “refusing to extradite Castro.”
Abbott responded by attacking Minnesota’s courtroom performance and turning the sanctuary-state line back on Ellison.
“You guys are such bad lawyers. You showed up unprepared, uninformed & unpersuasive. You don’t know the law & it showed,” Abbott wrote on X.
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“Minn. is the literal definition of a sanctuary state because you refuse to assist in enforcing immigration laws,” Abbott added. “I’ll put Minneapolis at the top of the list for future bus drop offs if we ever have a President like Joe Biden again.”
Castro’s release put a January ICE operation in north Minneapolis back at the center of a state-versus-state political fight.
He faces four felony counts of second-degree assault and one misdemeanor count of falsely reporting a crime in Minnesota state court after allegedly firing through the front door of an occupied home and striking Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg.
Castro has maintained that he acted in self-defense. Minnesota prosecutors say surveillance video and other evidence undercut his claim that he opened fire after being attacked with a broom and snow shovel.
The state charges were brought by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s office after Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigated the shooting.
The Trump administration first presented the incident as an attack on an ICE officer. ICE later put Castro and another agent on administrative leave after its acting director said they appeared to have made “untruthful statements” about what happened.
Federal assault charges against Sosa-Celis and another man were dismissed after prosecutors said new evidence was “materially inconsistent” with the original allegations.
Abbott still has not granted Minnesota’s extradition request. Texas law generally caps detention before extradition at 90 days, and Abbott has said Texas is looking at whether Castro legally counts as a fugitive because he returned to Texas on federal orders instead of choosing to flee Minnesota.
Abbott’s office praised the judge’s decision and accused Minnesota of trying to force the governor’s review onto its timetable.
The fight over Castro echoed a second Texas immigration clash, this one involving Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Talarico criticized the deportation of Victor Martinez Nieto and his 5-year-old son, Liam Tadeo, after federal immigration authorities detained the pair in Austin earlier this month while they were heading to a soccer match.
The boy had been expected to start kindergarten this week, Talarico said.
“ICE kidnapped Liam Tadeo on his way to a soccer game with his dad,” Talarico wrote on X. “Liam should be in kindergarten. Instead, our government has thrown him in a prison camp hundreds of miles from home.”
A 5-year-old Texan just spent the first day of school in an ICE detention center.
ICE kidnapped Liam Tadeo on his way to a soccer game with his dad.
Liam should be in kindergarten. Instead, our government has thrown him in a prison camp hundreds of miles from home. pic.twitter.com/MHsfb6uxLp
— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) August 27, 2026
Victor Martinez Nieto and Liam were both deported Tuesday, and Talarico posted Thursday that Liam had been removed.
Mullin said Talarico was leaving out that Liam was deported with his father because Victor Martinez Nieto asked for it.
“ICE does NOT separate families,” Mullin wrote. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates. In this case, both the father and son were deported together.”
Mullin also said parents bear responsibility for what happens to their children when they are arrested, just as U.S. citizen parents do when they break the law.
Victor Martinez Nieto and Liam were held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. The Austin American-Statesman reported that Martinez Nieto was arrested by immigration officers in November 2025, deported in February and later reentered the United States illegally.
In Boston, the immigration fight moved from custody and deportation to private parking lots.
Mayor Michelle Wu urged garage and lot owners not to lease space to ICE after Boston barred ICE vehicles from using city-owned parking lots for operations and the agency began looking for “surge parking” in 14 cities.
ICE’s notice sought 249 contiguous parking spaces in Boston.
Wu asked parking operators to “reject ICE staging facilities,” said the city had filed a Freedom of Information Act request “for any local responses to ICE,” and warned that parking access for ICE would be “an unprovoked and unwarranted escalation” with risks to public safety and economic activity.
The mayor also said she had joined six other Greater Boston cities in signing executive orders prohibiting ICE from staging operations on municipal property and parking lots.
“Today, I ask you to join us: Reject any proposition by ICE to facilitate an attack on the people of Boston,” Wu wrote.
DHS accused Wu of targeting private property owners because she could not legally block ICE from renting from them.
“She knows she has NO authority to block us from using private property. So, she’s hunting down private property owners and threatening them for working with ICE — because she’d rather intimidate law-abiding Bostonians than get criminal illegal aliens OFF the street,” DHS wrote on X.
The agency also called Wu a “pro-criminal illegal alien politician” and said her Freedom of Information Act request showed she understood she could not bar ICE from private property.
DHS said private citizens should be able to work with federal law enforcement “free of threats, intimidation and coercion from their radical left-wing mayor who shamelessly compared ICE agents to a neo-Nazi group.”
