This story first broke in January 2026. We’re resurfacing it because the cruelty it documents wasn’t a one-time failure — it was the method. And months later, no one has been held accountable. One of the missions of Resist Hate is to speak up for those who are silenced.
Alberto Castañeda Mondragón suffered 8 skull fractures and 5 brain bleeds during the officers’ violent assault. ICE continues to claim he sustained the severe head injuries when he “ran headfirst into a wall. Multiple doctors have said his injuries are “inconsistent with” the story ICE has been telling.
Mondragón said he remembers “ICE officers striking him with the same metal rod used to break the windows of the vehicle he was in.”
It’s ridiculous that corporate media even entertains the ICE/DHS version of the story. They have lied about the circumstances of every incident where an agent shot someone.
The story of what happened to Mondragón can never be forgotten. Until there is accountability, we will continue to tell his story, and others like it.
In January 2026, immigration agents brought a Mexican roofer named Alberto Castañeda Mondragón into a Minneapolis hospital with broken bones in his face and skull. The agents had a story ready: the 31-year-old had tried to flee while handcuffed and purposely ran headfirst into a brick wall.
The nurses didn’t believe it for a second. Neither should you.
The injuries don’t match the story
A CT scan showed at least eight skull fractures and life-threatening bleeding in at least five areas of his brain.
The Associated Press interviewed a doctor and five nurses at Hennepin County Medical Center, plus an outside physician.
Every one of them said the same thing: these injuries are not what happens when a person runs into a wall.
Dr. Lindsey C. Thomas, a forensic pathologist who spent more than 30 years as a Minnesota medical examiner, made it clear.
A person, she said, cannot get skull fractures on both sides of the head and from front to back by running into something. You don’t need a medical degree to do that math.
ICE’s own version of what happened kept shifting, too. While their official filing claimed he hurt himself fleeing, at least one officer told hospital staff at the bedside that Castañeda Mondragón “got his s**t rocked” after his arrest. (99% sure that officer was telling the truth.Apparently he couldn’t take not being allowed to brag about how badly they hurt him. Maybe he was thinking about hospital staff as if they were the priest lstening to secret confessions. They aren’t going to tell anyone.)
I can’t move on without mentioning this: Earlier, I mentioned the types of people who would apply for this job — how many of them probably hate immigrants and see the job as an opportunity to do harass immigrants, assault them, and get them out of the country.
I think the way the officer chose to tell medical staff that the officers beat him up — “he got his s**t rocked,” is very telling about which type of person he is.
Who He is
Castañeda Mondragón is from Veracruz, Mexico, and he was working as a roofer. He has a 10-year-old daughter back home who he was helping to support.
He entered the U.S. legally in 2022 and started his own business the next year.
He has no criminal record.
His lawyers say he was racially profiled — targeted simply for being a brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking man at a spot agents decided to sweep.
A federal judge ultimately ruled the arrest unlawful and ordered him released. They arrested him without a reason. ICE only found out that he had overstayed his visa after they’d already arrested him.
They didn’t know if he was here legally or illegally. They didn’t know if he was a missionary who traveled the world to help others, if he was the number one supporter of Donald Trump — you get the point.
The officers didn’t know whether or not he had ever committed a crime. Yet they felt so much [hate?] anger towards him that they arrested and nearly killed him? Why?
Is this the kind of country we want to live in? Where federal officers can arrest you for no reason other than you look like an immigrant so you probably did something illegal?
His arrest happened the day after the first of two fatal shootings by immigration officers in Minneapolis — part of “Operation Metro Surge,” the Trump administration‘s enforcement blitz in Minnesota.
His Story in His Voice
Alberto Casteñada Mondragón told his story and asked for help on a GoFundMe campaign created on his behalf.
Resist Hate is asking readers to match our donation of $5.
Let’s show ICE that the American people see what they’re doing and we support the people they’re working to ‘get rid of.’
The following is a transcript of Mondragón telling his story in his own words.
“My name is Alberto Castañeda Mondragón. I am asking for your help to pay for my medical bills and short-term expenses so that I can return to work and support my family.
I entered the United States legally with a work visa and have worked ever since. I never had any issues with law enforcement, until last month, when ICE crushed my skull.
Ever since, I have lost many memories, precious ones that my daughter, my parents, my brother, my sisters and my friends have had to remind me of, and also painful ones like the injury itself. I don’t know why ICE did this to me.
They did not detain me after the hospital, I am not a criminal, and the doctors say they were untruthful about how the injuries occurred. But I prefer not to fight, I only want to recover, pay my bills, and go back to work.
The Associated Press has written stories that you can read with more details about what happened, but here is my story about who I am.
Life gives you great places to enjoy life, like the place where you were born, where you lived your life, where you’ve experienced good moments and low ones, but always searching for a better future.
Tlapacoyan, Veracruz — a city with great tourism, a major producer of oranges and bananas.
Going back to my childhood, I am the 3rd of 4 siblings. The oldest are my two sisters, then me, and last a brother. I only finished secondary school and went to work in the fields with my father.
My sisters, being older, led more peaceful lives. My younger brother finished school. I preferred to work with my dad. He would give me good scoldings sometimes for not keeping the production of dominico bananas in order.
I learned from every word of his, and always fair at work — just as there were scoldings, there were also phrases of joy for seeing my improvement and the growth in my homeland.
My mother, a person whose advice and words changed my life: On days when, exhausted from work, I didn’t want to go to the fields — she would say, “Don’t you want a more peaceful life as an older adult than what you work now? But when you get married, thanks to fighting as a young man, you’ll have something more, and your family and you will be more at peace.”
My life is filled with much good advice, but above all, lessons.
Respect before everyone. Lessons from people who sometimes want to humiliate you — it’s better to ignore them and show what you’re worth.
This brings into your life the best of everything — a daughter who makes it worthwhile to give her honesty, responsibility, and humility in life.
A better economic life, but that sometimes makes us travel far from them, to take distance to another country for a better life for your parents.
Due to an illness my father had, which was quite serious, and a big downturn in the fields where the prices of products had fallen, I had to look for another way to move forward.
Without fear of fighting in whatever job, wherever it may be — a friend supported me with the suggestion of being able to go to the United States.
Without a doubt, inside, this makes your life shake and feel pain, but you also feel that if you don’t fight for something, what he fought for you, one day you’ll see it by your side.
Without a doubt, life gives you bad moments during a bad time — that’s what a person believes when saying goodbye to the people they love.
It’s a long journey when leaving your town. The slow hours, the urge to cry, missing the people who hug you every day, who support you.
Inside you carry that pain, but on the outside I try to smile, because showing I am weak has always made me think that there will be people who will try to take advantage of you.
Arriving to work in a new city, an unimaginable job, traveling from city to city each week, and unfortunately the little communication with your family makes your life tremble for a second, but noticing when you can that they are already doing better makes you smile.
And I don’t mind suffering myself if I see them smiling and well.
As the months passed, I arrived in the city of Baker, Minnesota with the company, and on opening day my neighbor from the ranch showed up — someone who had left the town years ago.
He came as just another customer to my job. He wanted to talk with me; because of my work, he waited until closing time.
A conversation about how I was doing, whether my job was hard, led to another topic — for example, my salary, which unfortunately was very low.
He proposed that I leave there and go work with him. What I earned in a week, he earned in a day. Maybe people will say he no longer wanted to return to his town, that’s why he left that company.
That’s not how it was.
That split my life in two, but only that way was I able to help my father get ahead faster.
Life perhaps turns around on its own, and indeed that does happen — you don’t let it destroy you even if you’re missing at least a “how are you” from the person who is important in your life.
Time and courage achieved that in my new job, despite being new, I became one of the best.
The construction of a house in my town, a better life for my daughter — being my pride, at her 10 years she has shown it.”
What happened in the hospital
The cruelty didn’t end at the arrest. Inside the ICU, ICE officers tried to shackle his ankles to the bed — a man with a traumatic brain injury so severe he didn’t know what year it was.
When he stood and took a few wobbly steps, officers decided he was trying to escape. Nurses had to explain that this is just how brain-injured people behave: impulsive, disoriented, not running for the door.
The standoff pulled in hospital security, the CEO, and the hospital’s attorney before ICE finally agreed to remove the shackles.
Staff described agents loitering on hospital grounds, demanding proof of citizenship from patients and employees, and staying at detainees’ bedsides for days.
Workers were so unnerved they switched to encrypted messaging and avoided certain bathrooms to dodge the agents.
Why we’re bringing it back
Here’s what’s happened since you may have first heard this story. Castañeda Mondragón has now spoken for himself, and his account is far worse than the sanitized “ran into a wall” line.
He says agents pulled him from a friend’s car, threw him to the ground, and repeatedly struck his head with a steel baton — then beat him again at the detention center. He says it was completely unprovoked.
In February, the FBI and St. Paul police opened investigations. And ICE? The Department of Homeland Security doubled down.
Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted he fell and hit his head against a concrete wall while fleeing toward a highway — a claim that contradicted ICE’s own court filing about when they even learned his visa status. The agency could not keep its own story straight.
This isn’t an isolated case. In Minneapolis, federal prosecutors dropped charges against two Venezuelan men after video contradicted ICE officers’ sworn testimony.
The fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents is under a Justice Department civil rights investigation. A pattern emerges, and it always points to the same agency.
The human cost
Castañeda Mondragón has lasting brain damage. He has lost much of his memory — he couldn’t even recognize his own daughter when hospital staff handed him a phone.
“I am your daughter,” she told him. “You left when I was 6 years old.” She now calls him daily, trying to rebuild a father’s memories one conversation at a time.
His brother summed up what was taken: instead of good memories of America, his family is left with the knowledge that people here treated him like an animal.
These violent psycopaths are still out there hunting down immigrants. We cannot accept this as our new reality. I dont know about you, but I’m sick of the lies, hate, and overt violence coming out of this administration.
We’re republishing this because forgetting is how impunity wins. A man’s skull was broken in eight places in the custody of our government, and the agency that did it is still asking the public to believe he did it to himself.
Remember his name.
