District attorney says ICE deported at least two material witnesses over his objection
The unmarked SUV that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Mario Alberto Morales drove into a construction worker in Houston on October 10 was carrying two handcuffed detainees from a previous, unrelated operation at the time of the crash, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said Friday.
Gonzalez told a news conference that his investigators later found out the detainees were in Morales’s vehicle when it struck Miguel Parra Hernandez. “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.”
District Attorney Sean Teare said at the same news conference that ICE deported at least two “material witnesses” within a week of Parra Hernandez 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”. He remains in ICE custody, and his lawyers have said he would need numerous operations to recover from his injuries. Members of his family appeared at a news conference earlier this month.
Teare said he had collected “a significant amount of information” on Morales’s background, and said ICE hired him 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.
The findings came as Teare announced that a grand jury empanelled to investigate the case had indicted Morales, 33, on Friday morning on a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Teare said the evidence presented to the grand jury was “as clear as any that I’ve ever prosecuted or investigated”. Prosecutors said Morales deliberately veered his SUV into Miguel Parra Hernandez, 48, causing multiple leg fractures and a hip injury.
Morales was driving an unmarked Jeep Cherokee and attempted to stop a pickup truck containing two men, who jumped out and fled, according to the account presented by prosecutors at the news conference. 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.
ICE has offered a different account. In an audio recording of a 911 call that 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 called the indictment “nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians” — a term used to describe local officials who do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities — and said federal officers acting in the course of their duties can be investigated only by other federal agencies. “Local governments do not have the authority to run such an investigation,” the spokesperson said.
Teare, in announcing the charge, denounced the agency’s activities and conduct in support of the immigration enforcement campaign during Donald Trump’s second presidency. “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, 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,” he said. “An ICE badge does not give you free rein to injure, kill, or violate the constitutional rights of anyone.”
ICE has identified the man it said it was pursuing when Parra Hernandez was hurt as Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, whose whereabouts are unknown. The agency released an image of someone it said was him, but the Houston-based immigration advocacy group FIEL said the person in the photo was Jose Hector Jimenez, who died in 2017 while being pursued by federal immigration authorities as he tried to re-enter the US. FIEL produced a Mexican death certificate provided by Jimenez’s family.
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. Friday’s indictment came a 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.