A Harris County grand jury on Friday indicted a federal immigration officer for hitting a man with an unmarked SUV, in a case where prosecutors say surveillance video contradicts what the government first said happened.
The officer, Mario Alberto Morales, 33, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He was not arrested Friday; a warrant is to be issued. A local district attorney rarely prosecutes a federal immigration agent, and the case raises a question that reaches every community ICE works in, Black immigrant and Black citizen neighborhoods included: when an agent is accused of a crime, who decides whether he answers for it?
What is established and what is alleged
On Oct. 10, Morales was driving an unmarked Jeep Cherokee in a parking lot near Clay Road and Highway 6 during an ICE operation. Miguel Parra Hernandez, 48, a construction worker from Mexico, was running on foot. He was struck, and his leg was broken. Court records also describe injuries to his hip and ankle. He remains in federal custody at a rehabilitation facility.
Those facts are not in dispute. How he was struck is.
ICE’s first account, repeated after the indictment, is that Parra Hernandez ran in front of the vehicle. The agency called claims that he was hit intentionally “RECKLESS and FALSE.” District Attorney Sean Teare says the surveillance video shows something else: the Jeep speeding over a median toward a man running away, then a few sharp turns of the wheel before the impact. Teare called the evidence “as clear as any that I’ve ever prosecuted.”
Reports on the body camera footage have Parra Hernandez saying “You ran over me” and Morales answering “You got hit with the car, bro.” The footage has been described, not released, and a jury has not weighed it.
There is a second dispute. ICE said Morales was pursuing a man named Jose Mendoza-Cervantes. The family told reporters that man has been dead since 2017.
Who answers for a federal agent
Morales’ attorney, David Lindenmuth, called the incident “so clearly just an accident” and said the DA indicted “for political gain.” He also argues that state prosecution of a federal officer violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, and says no federal officer has been prosecuted by a Harris County district attorney “in recent memory.” ICE called the indictment “nothing more than a political stunt by Houston sanctuary politicians.”
Teare answered: “An ICE badge does not give you free rein to injure, kill, or violate the constitutional rights of anyone.”
Search warrant filings add to the dispute. They say ICE officers left the scene before local investigators finished and did not consent to a search of the vehicle, and that the Department of Homeland Security had not responded to the warrant as of late October, blocking forensic evidence collection, as Click2Houston reported.
The legal fight will likely turn on whether Morales was acting within his federal duties and whether a state court can try him. That decides whether local prosecutors are a check on federal agents, or whether the only check is the agency that employs them and has already called the allegation false.
Once Morales is arrested on the warrant, his lawyer’s Supremacy Clause argument is likely to be the first thing a judge is asked to decide.
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