Greg Abbott is a lawyer. In fact, the Texas governor is the former state attorney general and served before that as a justice on the Supreme Court of Texas. And yet, to preserve his MAGA bona fides, he affects to be a bumpkin who’s never read any part of the Constitution but the Second Amendment.
The governor is currently performing ignorance of Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2, better known as the Extradition Clause. If he acknowledges it, along with the Federal Extradition Act and Texas Code of Criminal Procedure 51.01, he’ll have to send an ICE agent to Minnesota to be prosecuted for shooting an immigrant and filing a false police report. This would be most inconvenient for him politically, and so he affects stupidity.
On January 14, the agent, Christian Castro, was chasing a man through the streets of Minneapolis with his gun drawn. The man ran into the house of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was outside in his yard shoveling snow. Castro is alleged to have shot Sosa-Celis through the door, with the bullet lodging in the wall of a child’s bedroom.
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Castro claimed that Sosa-Celis had attacked him with the snow shovel. This claim was loudly amplified by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, and the DOJ actually charged Sosa-Celis with assault. But the case was quietly dropped when camera footage emerged demonstrating that Castro had lied his face off.
In May, Castro was indicted in Hennepin County and charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime. By then, Castro had decamped to Texas, and so the state of Minnesota sent a requisition warrant to Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Trevino. Trevino duly picked up the fugitive and booked him into the county jail on May 29. But for the past three months, Abbott has refused to sign Castro’s extradition warrant, despite persistent requests from Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
“Well, first of all, I don’t trust Tim Walz on anything, let alone something like this,” Abbott blustered in a press conference last week. “While they’re making demands, I got a demand of my own and that is: It’s time for Minnesota to step up and repay the United States of America and Americans for all the fraud that they have committed in their state under federal programs. I will not respond to them at all until they step up and do what’s right, and they acknowledge their fault in the fraud that took place, and they fully repay the United States of America for the fraud they committed.”
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Abbott’s outrage over this supposed “fraud” is somewhat undercut by the fact that he’s executed his ministerial duty with respect to at least three such extradition warrants in the past two months. But props for laundering that blood libel about Somali-Americans into the new cycle, sir!
On Tuesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued Abbott and Trevino in the Southern District of Texas seeking a writ of mandamus ordering him to sign the extradition order. He also requested a temporary restraining order, noting that Texas law only permits detention of fugitives for 90 days, and so Castro could be released on Thursday, the 27th. The motions allege that “has been in frequent communication with a woman in Mexico, including about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico when he is released.” There is a very real possibility that Castro could simply walk across the bridge in Brownsville and disappear — which certainly seems to be what Abbott is banking on.
The case was assigned to Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., who scheduled a hearing on the TRO for the 25th. Texas’s response is due by noon on the 24th, at which point we’ll find out how stupid lawyers for the state are willing to pretend to be in a federal courtroom. Their boss has certainly set a high bar!
Walz v. Abbott [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
