A Texas grand jury on Friday indicted ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, alleging he drove his vehicle into Miguel Parra Hernandez, who was on foot, earlier this month, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office announced Friday.
The indictment for Morales, 33, was handed up Friday morning by a Harris County grand jury. District Attorney Sean Teare and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office have scheduled a news conference later Friday.
The indictment is the first against an immigration agent in Texas. ICE enforcement agent Christian Castro has been indicted in connection with the January shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis in Minnesota.
The Oct. 10 collision left Parra with hip, leg and ankle injuries, including a broken leg, according to his family and representatives.
In a statement released after the collision, ICE said Parra “ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.” The officer was driving an SUV.
But after reviewing videos investigators collected in his office from local businesses and passersby, Teare accused the officer of deliberately running over Parra. ICE previously said accusations that its agent intentionally struck Parra were “reckless” and “false.”
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the indictment.
DHS placed an officer on administrative leave after the collision, a senior DHS official told NBC News earlier this month.
Security video of the incident obtained by Houston NBC affiliate KPRC shows a white truck facing the opposite direction of traffic on a busy road. Parra and another man get out of the white truck and run, the video shows.
Around the same time, the video shows, another vehicle jumped a yellow median and headed toward Parra. The video then shows the vehicle, unmarked, swerving left towards Chemin de Parra, in front of a truck stopped in a shopping center.
When the parked truck drives away, a man can be seen lying on the sidewalk behind the ICE vehicle, the video shows.
Teare, who worked several years as chief of Harris County’s vehicular crimes division, previously told NBC News that he searched for critical data on the vehicle involved in the collision, but that ICE removed the car from the scene.
Parra has lived in the United States for 34 years, starting when he was 14, and he has no criminal record, his lawyer told NBC News. He was doing stucco work when he was hit, according to an attorney. DHS said he was in the country without legal authorization.
ICE had said it was conducting a targeted enforcement operation to arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes and was not targeting Parra or another man who was also in a truck with Mendoza-Cervantes before they fled on foot.
But Mendoza-Cervantes’ daughter told Houston immigrant rights group FIEL of Houston and Parra’s attorney, Kim Bruno, that her father had been dead since 2017.
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