ICE agent indicted for ramming SUV into innocent man in Houston, Texas
A grand jury has indicted ICE agent Mario Morales for aggravated assault after he drove into a Mexican construction worker in Houston. The victim suffered multiple fractures and remains in ICE custody.
ICE agent charged with aggravated assault after striking Houston man with SUV
A federal immigration agent has been indicted on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after deliberately driving his SUV into a Texas man, leaving him with serious injuries. theguardian.com reports that Mario Alberto Morales, 33, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, veered his unmarked Jeep Cherokee into Miguel Parra Hernandez, 48, on 10 October during a botched traffic stop in Houston.
The Harris County grand jury returned the indictment on Friday morning. Parra Hernandez, a Mexican construction worker with no criminal record and no active deportation order, sustained multiple leg fractures and a hip injury.
At a news conference in Houston, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said the evidence presented to the grand jury was "as clear as any that I've ever prosecuted or investigated." He questioned the training Morales had received and criticised the conduct of ICE more broadly in connection with the immigration enforcement operations carried out under Donald Trump's second presidency.
Surveillance footage shown at the press conference depicted Parra Hernandez running across a restaurant car park when Morales's SUV swerved into him and ran him over. The two men the agent had originally been attempting to stop had already fled the vehicle on foot.
In a 911 call Morales made following the incident, he told the dispatcher that Parra Hernandez had run in front of his vehicle and was struck. ICE repeated that version of events in an official account released the following day. In a statement on Friday, an ICE spokesperson said: "Allegations that ICE struck Miguel Parra Hernandez intentionally are reckless and false." The spokesperson described the indictment as "nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians" and asserted that local governments lack the authority to investigate federal officers acting in the course of their duties.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez told the press conference that investigators subsequently discovered Morales's SUV contained two handcuffed detainees from a separate, unrelated operation at the time it struck Parra Hernandez. "I know of no law enforcement agency that would deem that to be acceptable," Gonzalez said, adding that the situation could have been even more dangerous had another collision occurred while the detainees were restrained and unable to move freely.
Teare also raised concerns about the deportation of witnesses. He said ICE removed at least two "material witnesses" within a week of the incident, over the objection of his office and without giving prosecutors any opportunity to interview them. Parra Hernandez himself, the district attorney noted, "is not even able to leave the rehab facility, and they are having court dates to try to deport him." The victim remains in ICE custody and his lawyers have said he will require numerous operations to recover.
Teare said Morales was hired by ICE in August 2025 as part of the agency's expanded immigration enforcement surge into several US cities. He said he had collected "a significant amount of information" on Morales's background but declined to share details about previous employers. He had not yet received any of Morales's training records. "I can unequivocally tell you that I've reviewed thousands of job applications and resumes for law enforcement officers from around this state, and I'm not familiar with a single agency that would have hired this person based on his past," Teare said.
The district attorney also cited what he described as a documented decline in reports of domestic violence, aggravated robberies and sexual assaults by victims who feared deportation. "Their behavior and the fear that's being instilled in such a big, vibrant group of people, of Harris county residents, is objectively making us all less safe," he told reporters. "An ICE badge does not give you free rein to injure, kill, or violate the constitutional rights of anyone."
Friday's indictment is not an isolated case. In March, Christian Castro, an ICE officer who shot and wounded a Venezuelan man during an operation in Minnesota in January, was charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime. Teare's office is also investigating the fatal shooting by ICE in Houston in July of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an immigrant who — like Parra Hernandez — was not the intended target of an enforcement operation.
The individual ICE said it was actually pursuing when Parra Hernandez was struck has not been located. The agency identified its target as a man named Jose Mendoza-Cervantes and released an image it said depicted him. Houston-based immigration advocacy group FIEL, however, produced a Mexican death certificate provided by the family of the man in the photograph, identifying him as Jose Hector Jimenez — a person who died in 2017 while being pursued by federal immigration authorities as he attempted to re-enter the United States.
Source: Google News MT