ICE officer charged with aggravated assault after Houston vehicle incident
Select a version of the text written from a presumed ideological perspective. This is not the original text, but a hypothetical version — how someone with that viewpoint might have phrased it. Tapping the current version again will return to the original or select cleaned version.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer was indicted on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after a video showed his vehicle striking a Mexican construction worker who was fleeing in Houston.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, identified as Mario Alberto Morales, was charged on Friday with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon following an October 10 incident in Houston. Prosecutors say Morales was driving an unmarked black Jeep Cherokee when it struck 48-year-old Miguel Parra Hernandez, a Mexican construction worker who was running away, leaving him with a broken leg and in custody.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, a Democrat, filed the indictment and noted that surveillance footage shows the vehicle accelerating over a median and moving within inches of Parra Hernandez before he falls to the ground. Teare stated the video “clearly contradicts” ICE’s account of the event.
ICE said Parra Hernandez stepped in front of the car and called accusations that the officer intentionally struck him false and “reckless.”
ICE has not responded to requests for comment on the indictment. The agency previously released a photo of another individual, Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, claiming he was the target of the operation that day. Family members of Parra Hernandez said they had never heard of Mendoza-Cervantes, and immigrant-rights group FIEL reported that the man identified by ICE had been dead since 2017.
Teare’s office also accused the Department of Homeland Security of failing to cooperate with the investigation and of potentially destroying evidence. The same office is probing a July shooting in which an ICE officer killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a case that remains under investigation.
The indictment marks one of the few criminal charges brought against a federal immigration officer during President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement period.