Agent Mario Alberto Morale charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon over incident in Houston
A federal immigration agent who drove into and seriously injured a Texas man on 10 October after a botched traffic stop was indicted Friday on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Mario Alberto Morales, 33, an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), deliberately veered his SUV into Miguel Parra Hernandez, 48, causing multiple leg fractures and a hip injury, journalists at a news conference in Houston were told.
In announcing the charge against Morales, Harris county district attorney Sean Teare questioned the training that Morales, a recent appointment by ICE, had received – and denounced the activities and conduct of the agency in support of the frequently violent immigration crackdown during Donald Trump’s second presidency.
His 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.
Friday’s indictment came little more than five months after Christian Castro, an ICE officer who shot and wounded a Venezuelan man in an operation in Minnesota in January, was charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime.
“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,” Teare told reporters, citing what he said was a documented drop-off in reports of domestic violence, aggravated robberies and sexual assaults by victims who feared deportation.
“One of the most insidious things about these tactics and the way that ICE is behaving in our community is the fear that a large percentage of our population has right now. An ICE badge does not give you free rein to injure, kill, or violate the constitutional rights of anyone.”
A grand jury empanelled to investigate the case involving Morales returned the indictment on Friday morning after hearing evidence that Teare said was “as clear as any that I’ve ever prosecuted or investigated”.
Morales was driving an unmarked Jeep Cherokee and attempted to stop a pickup truck containing two men who jumped out and fled. Surveillance video played at the news conference showed Parra Hernandez, a Mexican construction worker with no criminal record or active deportation order, running across a restaurant parking lot when the pursuing SUV swerved into him and ran him over.
In an audio recording of a 911 call Morales made requesting the assistance of paramedics and the Harris county sheriff’s office, he is heard telling the dispatcher that Parra Hernandez ran in front of his vehicle and was hit, an assertion repeated in an official ICE account of the case 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 men and women of ICE are entrusted with upholding the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity, and ethical conduct.”
The spokesperson said the indictment was “nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians”, using a term meant to describe local officials who don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
“Federal officers acting in the course of their duties can only be investigated by other federal agencies,” the spokesperson also said. “Local governments do not have the authority to run such an investigation.”
Harris county sheriff Ed Gonzalez told the press conference his investigators later found out that, at the time it struck Parra Hernandez, Morales’s SUV also contained two handcuffed detainees from a previous, unrelated operation.
“I know of no law enforcement agency that would deem that to be acceptable,” he said. “To the contrary, it’s very unsafe. If some other crash could have occurred with them being handcuffed and shackled inside the vehicle it would have been a maybe even worse situation because they were very limited in their movement and in the backseat of the vehicle.”
Teare said that ICE deported at least two “material witnesses” within a week of Parra being struck over the prosecutor’s objection and with no opportunity to interview them. Parra Hernandez, he said, “is not even able to leave the rehab facility, and they are having court dates to try to deport him”.
The district attorney said he had collected “a significant amount of information” on Morales’s background – and said he was hired by ICE in August 2025 as part of the agency’s aggressive immigration “surge” into a number of US cities.
He declined to give details of any previous employers and said he had not received any of Morales’s training records.
“Whether or not he has those, we don’t know, but 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.
Lawyers for Parra Hernandez, who remains in ICE custody, have said he would need numerous operations to recover from his injuries.
The whereabouts of the person that ICE said it was pursuing when Parra Hernandez was hurt are unknown. The agency identified a man named Jose Mendoza-Cervantes as their target, and released an image of someone they said was him.
The person in the photo, however, was Jose Hector Jimenez, who died in 2017 while being pursued by federal immigration authorities as he was trying to re-enter the US, said the Houston-based immigration advocacy group FIEL, which produced a Mexican death certificate provided by his family.
Explore more on these topicsReuse this content
Source: www.theguardian.com
