I spent 35 years wearing a badge in this county, and I learned one thing that never stopped being true: the law doesn’t care what agency patch is on your shoulder. At least it isn’t supposed to. What we’re watching right now proves that promise is being broken on purpose, by the very people sworn to keep it.
An ICE officer named Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Sosa-Celis, through a closed door in Minneapolis back in January. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t just get the story wrong — DHS lied to the American public. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stood in front of cameras and called it self-defense, an “ambush” with a broom handle and a snow shovel.
Video surfaced the following month and shredded that fiction. Federal prosecutors quietly dropped the assault charges they’d filed against Sosa-Celis and another man, because the men who filed them knew the truth wouldn’t survive a courtroom. This week, Castro was finally indicted — but only for lying to investigators. Not for putting a bullet through a door and into a man’s leg. Not for the deprivation of a man’s civil rights.
Here’s the part that should make your blood run cold. The assistant U.S. attorney who investigated this case — a career prosecutor named Matthew Evans, the kind of person who spends decades doing the unglamorous work of holding power accountable — believed the evidence supported the real charge: deprivation of rights under color of law.
The statute exists for exactly this situation. He pushed for it. He was overruled by his own U.S. attorney and by political appointees at the Justice Department in Washington. Then, days later, he was fired.
Let’s call this what it is. It’s not prosecutorial discretion. It’s the Justice Department being weaponized — not to enforce the law evenly, but to shield federal agents from the same statute that applies to everybody else with a badge and a gun.
When the people at the top of DOJ overrule their own prosecutor’s judgment to protect an ICE officer, and then fire him for objecting on the record, they aren’t managing a case. They’re sending a message to every federal agent in the country: break the rules under this administration’s banner, and Washington will cover for you.
Compare that to what happened six years ago, right here in San Diego County. A sheriff’s deputy named Aaron Russell shot an unarmed man, Nicholas Bils, in the back as Bils ran away from him. No threat. No warning. Bils died on the pavement outside our own downtown jail.
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division didn’t blink. They indicted Russell under that very same statute and took it to trial — twice, after the first jury hung. The second jury convicted him this past March in under seven hours. He was sentenced in May to 12 years in federal prison.
Same law. Same statute. Same basic facts: an armed officer, an unarmed man, a shooting nobody needed, a story that collapsed under video. In one case, the DOJ ran through to conviction without flinching. In the other, DOJ’s own leadership blocked and then punished the prosecutor for trying. The difference isn’t the evidence. The difference is which administration was in power and which badge needed protecting.
I’m not naive about prosecutorial discretion. Cases differ, juries are unpredictable, reasonable lawyers disagree. But strip away the lawyerly language and look at what actually happened: a sitting U.S. attorney and the DOJ killed a legitimate civil rights charge against a federal agent, then fired the prosecutor who documented it in writing.
That isn’t discretion. That’s a cover-up wearing a suit.
Equal justice under the law is carved into the front of the Supreme Court building. It is not a slogan. It is supposed to be the whole point. A local sheriff’s deputy answers to it. A federal immigration officer, under this Justice Department, apparently does not — and the prosecutor who tried to make him answer to it lost his job for the trouble.
My mother used to tell me the measure of a just system isn’t how it treats the people in power — it’s how it treats everyone else the same way it treats them. By that measure, what happened this week in Washington isn’t justice. It’s protection, dressed up to look like it.
Matthew Evans did his job. He told the truth in writing and got fired for it. Somebody in Washington owes the public an answer, under oath, and soon.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
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