A Texas prosecutor said he was considering felony assault charges for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who ran over a man following an attempted traffic stop and broke his leg in multiple places. Sean Teare, district attorney for Harris county, said video of the incident in west Houston on Saturday morning, in which the officer’s unmarked SUV is seen veering into the man as he runs away across an empty parking lot, could support a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A conviction carries a possible prison sentence of up to 20 years.
The injured man, Miguel Parra-Hernandez, remained under ICE supervision at a hospital in Houston on Wednesday with serious hip and leg injuries that his representatives said would require a series of future surgeries. ICE has conceded the 48-year-old was not the target of the traffic stop, but said he was in the country illegally. The video showed the officer pursuing Parra-Hernandez in his vehicle in apparent contravention of new guidelines for traffic stops 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 told NBC that ICE was refusing to cooperate, and had denied his investigators’ request for access to information from the vehicle’s data recorder. 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,” Teare said.
ICE did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment. 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 press conference on Monday, Kim Bruno, Parra-Hernandez’s lawyer, and Cesar Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Fiel Houston, told reporters that he 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. NBC cited an ICE spokesperson who said allegations Parra-Hernandez was intentionally struck were “reckless and false” and “disgusting smears … peddled by the media”.
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