By Hannah Rabinowitz, Whitney Wild, Holmes Lybrand

(CNN) — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent has been federally charged with lying about the events leading up to his shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant earlier this year, according to an indictment that was unsealed on Friday.

The officer, Christian Castro, is facing six counts of making false statements, one for each alleged lie he told investigators about the incident. He turned himself in to authorities on Thursday.

On Friday morning, he pleaded not guilty in Texas federal court, The Associated Press reported.

The judge ordered him released on a $75,000 unsecured bond and with a GPS ankle monitor.

This is the first time the Justice Department has charged an officer for conduct that occurred on-duty during its highly publicized immigration operations nationwide. Castro was among the thousands of agents involved in crackdown, which led to several violent clashes between law enforcement officers and protesters and the death of two US citizens.

Just days after one of those deadly incidents, Castro and his partner attempted to stop a vehicle driven by a man identified by prosecutors only as “A.A.”

That man, according to a source familiar with the matter, is a Venezuelan immigrant named Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna.

Aljorna got out of the car and ran from Castro, federal prosecutors said, but Castro caught up with him in his own front yard. Aljorna’s cousin, 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who is also a Venezuelan immigrant, tried to help him. Aljorna broke free and the two ran toward their front door, at which point Castro “stood up, drew his service weapon, and fired a single shot through the front door,” court documents say.

The shot hit Sosa-Celis in the leg and was lodged into the wall of the downstairs apartment in their duplex, according to the indictment. There were two one-year-old children inside that apartment, prosecutors say.

After the shooting, Castro allegedly relayed an entirely different story to an FBI agent. Castro claimed he was beaten with both a broom and a shovel by three men for several minutes and shot at the men from the ground because he feared for his life. He now stands charged for each alleged lie.

Federal prosecutors initially charged Sosa-Celis and Aljorna, but those charges were dropped after investigators reviewed surveillance footage and other material from the incident that conflicted with Castro’s account.

Castro and a second agent were soon placed on administrative leave. Federal prosecutors told the judge overseeing the case against Sosa-Celis that the agents had made “false statements” under oath, and former ICE Director Todd Lyons said later the Justice Department was investigating the “untruthful statements.”

The Justice Department is still considering whether to bring civil rights charges against Castro, one of the sources said.

Those charges, which are called color of law charges, are often very complicated and have historically taken months or years to bring. It took the department nearly a year to bring a civil rights case against Derek Chauvin related to George Floyd’s death, and more than two years for the department to charge Louisiana Metro Police Department officers connected to Breonna Taylor’s killing.

Earlier this week, a federal prosecutor working on the case told lawyers for Sosa-Celis and other victims that Justice Department officials blocked the push to bring a more serious civil rights charge against Castro for the shooting, ProPublica reported on Wednesday.

A person familiar with the matter pushed back, telling CNN a formal decision on whether to bring those civil rights charges has not been made. The prosecutor, Matthew Evans, was fired and is under investigation for alleged obstruction of a grand jury probe, according to the person.

An automatic response from Evans’ department email said he was “on leave.” CNN made multiple other attempts to reach him.

Castro also faces the separate state charges in Minnesota over the same incident. He was released from a Texas jail last week after the governor there declined to immediately approve his extradition to Minnesota.

“Mr. Castro has been indicted for making false statements. But he made them to cover up the fact that he shot my client through the door of an occupied house without a self-defense justification,” Sosa-Celis’ lawyer, Robin M. Wolpert, said in a statement to CNN. “Although the evidence strongly supports civil rights charges, the federal government has grossly undercharged this case. Mr. Sosa Celis wants Mr. Castro to be held fully accountable for his crimes.”

Lawyers for Castro, speaking outside of court on Friday, said their client has lived a life of service and took issue with the Minnesota prosecution’s allegation that he’d be a flight risk because he has ties to Mexico.

“To see Mr. Castro not get the benefit of the doubt that is baked into our law since the inception of our country, and to basically be branded as a guilty person who is basically fleeing from the government, is sad to see,” attorney David Lindenmuth said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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