• A federal judge has denied an extradition request for ICE agent Christian Castro, who shot a man in Minnesota.
• The ruling means Castro will likely be released from custody in Texas.
• Castro faces multiple charges, including assault and falsely reporting a crime.

A federal judge denied Minnesota's request to extradite Christian Castro, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent facing assault charges for shooting a man during an immigration raid on January 14. Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruled that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has not yet acted on the extradition request, thereby not violating any laws, which allows Castro to be released soon due to Texas's 90-day detention limit for extradition cases according to Reuters, Al Jazeera, and Los Angeles Times.

Castro has been in custody in Brownsville, Texas, since May and is charged with four counts of second-degree assault along with a charge of falsely reporting a crime after firing through the door of a home, injuring 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minnesota authorities argue that Castro poses a flight risk and that he misrepresented the event, claiming self-defense against supposed assaults from Sosa-Celis and another individual, which were later disproven by video evidence according to Los Angeles Times and Reuters.

Following this ruling, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously sought a restraining order against Castro's release to prevent him from fleeing to Mexico, where he had expressed plans to marry and buy a house, information gathered from calls made during his detention. Ellison accused Abbott, a Republican, of politically motivated delays against federal law regarding the extradition process in response to Castro's actions during a surge of ICE operations under former President Donald Trump, which were controversial among Minnesotans, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters.