Texas Grand Jury Indicts ICE Officer Over SUV Strike on Fleeing Man
A Harris County grand jury charged ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales with aggravated assault. ICE calls the case a political stunt.
A grand jury in Harris County, Texas, on Friday indicted a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on a felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, in a case prosecutors say involved an officer deliberately driving an SUV into a man running away on foot in Houston. ICE disputes that account and has dismissed the indictment as politically motivated.
The officer, Mario Alberto Morales, 33, is accused of striking Miguel Parra-Hernandez, 48, during an immigration enforcement operation on Oct. 10. Sean Teare, the Democratic district attorney of Harris County, which includes Houston, announced the charge at a news conference. NBC News reported that it is the first indictment of an immigration agent in Texas.
An indictment is a formal accusation, not a finding of guilt. The CBS News report on the charge included no comment from Morales or an attorney for him, and none of the reports reviewed for this article said whether he has entered a plea or when he is due in court.
What prosecutors allege
Teare said the deadly weapon named in the case is the officer’s vehicle, according to the Texas Tribune. He told reporters that a conviction could bring two to 20 years in prison, CBS News reported.
Much of the case rests on video. The Tribune reported that surveillance footage from a nearby business shows two men leaving a white pickup and running in different directions through a parking lot while a black SUV follows one of them. NBC News, citing security video aired by Houston station KPRC, described an unmarked vehicle jumping a median and swerving toward Parra-Hernandez before hitting him near a stopped truck in a shopping center.
The Associated Press reported earlier this month that another vehicle blocks the moment of impact in the surveillance footage. At Friday’s news conference, Teare played ICE body camera footage. NBC News said it shows the officer turning the steering wheel to the left before a scream is heard, with the injured man crying out that he had been run over. The officer can be heard telling someone, “I hit him with the car,” according to CBS News and NBC News.
Teare, who once led the Harris County prosecutors’ vehicle crimes division, described the proof in forceful terms. “The evidence that we have in this case is as clear as any that I’ve ever prosecuted or investigated,” he said, according to the Tribune.
Parra-Hernandez suffered a broken leg, and his family and representatives also reported hip and ankle injuries, NBC News said. The network reported that he came to the United States at age 14 and was doing stucco work at the time. His attorney says he has no criminal record. The Department of Homeland Security says he is in the country without legal permission, and Teare said no deportation order was in place against him. Teare said Parra-Hernandez is now at a rehabilitation facility in ICE custody.
ICE’s response and a disputed target
ICE has rejected the allegation that the strike was intentional. After the collision the agency called such claims “reckless” and “false” and said Parra-Hernandez “ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck,” the AP reported. Following the indictment, an ICE spokesperson described it as a political stunt by what the spokesperson called Houston sanctuary politicians, NBC News reported. A senior DHS official told the network that the officer was placed on administrative leave after the incident.
The account of why officers were there is also contested. ICE said it was running a targeted operation to arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, a man it said had a deportation order, and believed he was in the same truck as Parra-Hernandez. But Mendoza-Cervantes’ daughter has said he is dead. NBC News reported she told Parra-Hernandez’s attorney and FIEL Houston, an immigrant rights group, that he died in 2017, while the Tribune cited a New York Times report in which she said he died nearly a decade ago. The AP reported that attorneys and relatives of others arrested in the operation said they did not know anyone by that name.
Prosecutors and ICE have also clashed over physical evidence. Teare told the AP in mid-October that the officer drove the SUV away before investigators arrived with a tow truck to impound it, which he said could overwrite crash data stored in the vehicle. He accused the agency of destroying potential evidence “either intentionally or through gross negligence.” He also said ICE and DHS had not cooperated with his office.
What comes next
The case is likely to test how far local prosecutors can go in charging federal officers. ICE argues that only federal agencies may investigate federal officers acting in the course of their duties, a claim Teare called false, according to NBC News, which described the broader question as still contested. Teare said a federal immigration badge gives no one permission to injure or kill people or to violate their constitutional rights, the network reported.
The Houston case is not the only one of its kind. NBC News noted that Christian Castro, an ICE enforcement officer, was previously charged over a January shooting of a man in Minnesota. In Harris County, prosecutors are also investigating a July shooting in which an ICE officer killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, the AP reported. The AP counted that death among at least 10 involving encounters with immigration officers since the start of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
