ICE refused investigators access to SUV’s data recorder
The Harris County district attorney said Wednesday he is considering filing an aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charge against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer whose unmarked SUV struck a man during an attempted traffic stop in west Houston over the weekend, breaking the man’s leg in multiple places.
In an interview with NBC News, Sean Teare said surveillance video of the Saturday morning incident shows the officer’s SUV veering into Miguel Parra-Hernandez, 48, as he ran across an empty parking lot. “It’s pretty obvious that this was an intentional striking and running over of the person by the vehicle,” Teare told the network, adding that his view was shared by “many other investigators” who had seen the footage.
Parra-Hernandez remained under ICE supervision at a Houston hospital Wednesday with serious hip and leg injuries that will require a series of future surgeries, his representatives said.
ICE acknowledged Parra-Hernandez was not the target of the traffic stop but said he was in the country illegally. Over the weekend, an agency spokesperson said the target of the early-morning operation was another man, Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, an undocumented immigrant with multiple prior arrests and a final order of removal signed by a judge.
At a Monday press conference, Parra-Hernandez’s lawyer Kim Bruno and Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Fiel Houston, told reporters that Parra-Hernandez had never met Mendoza-Cervantes. Bruno said her client fled because he did not know who was in the dark-colored vehicle that was not using lights or a siren. He has no criminal record and was on his way to work when ICE agents appeared, she said.
The video, Teare said, shows the officer pursuing Parra-Hernandez in apparent contravention of new guidelines for traffic stops that the agency implemented this month after a series of violent and fatal confrontations involving federal immigration officers over the summer.
Teare is investigating the incident with the Harris County sheriff’s office, which said an ICE agent moved the pickup truck Parra-Hernandez and another unidentified person were riding in, then left the scene in the ICE vehicle before sheriff’s deputies arrived.
The district attorney said ICE is refusing to cooperate and has denied his investigators’ request for access to information from the SUV’s data recorder. Teare said his office had begun drafting a search warrant for the recorder when the ICE agent who had been driving at the time of the collision returned to the vehicle and drove it away from the scene.
“In my 20-year career, I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Teare said. “You put it on a flatbed trailer and you take it to forensically download it.”
Teare said he believed two other people from an entirely different operation were in custody in the back of the ICE vehicle when the driver began pursuing Parra-Hernandez, and that his office is working to ensure they remain in the country to provide evidence as material witnesses.
“I’ve worked with law enforcement for 20 years,” Teare said. “There is not a single agency in the US that would teach that once you put people in custody in your car, you then begin to pursue other people. Every single person out there [was] in danger again.”
Teare said his team had gathered evidence that “goes above” the surveillance video aired by multiple local media outlets, and set up a portal for additional videos or photographs of the incident that does not require witnesses to provide citizenship or immigration information.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. NBC cited an ICE spokesperson who called allegations that Parra-Hernandez was intentionally struck “reckless and false” and “disgusting smears … peddled by the media.”
“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.