A Texas prosecutor said he was considering filing felony assault charges against an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer who ran over a man after an attempted traffic stop and broke his leg in several places. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said video of the incident in west Houston on Saturday morning, which shows the officer’s unmarked SUV veering toward the man as he flees through an empty parking lot, could support a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A conviction carries a possible prison sentence “It’s pretty obvious that this was an intentional hit and run over of the person by the vehicle,” Teare told NBC News, adding that his view was shared by “many other investigators” who had seen the footage. The injured man, Miguel Parra-Hernández, remained under ICE supervision at a Houston hospital on Wednesday with serious hip and leg injuries that his representatives said would require a series of surgeries in the future. ICE has admitted that the 48-year-old man was not the target of the traffic stop, but said he was in the country illegally. The video showed the officer pursuing Parra-Hernández 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 agents over the summer. Teare is investigating the incident with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which said an ICE agent moved the van that Parra-Hernández and another unidentified person were traveling in, and then left the scene in the ICE vehicle earlier. Sheriff’s deputies arrived. The district attorney told NBC that ICE was refusing to cooperate and had denied its investigators’ request to access information from the vehicle’s data recorder. “Our office began drafting a search warrant that we were in the process of drafting when the ICE agent in question, the one we believed had been driving at the time of the collision, jumped back into the car and drove it away from the scene,” Teare said. “In my 20-year career, I have never heard of anything like this. [You] put it on a flatbed trailer and take it to be forensically unloaded.” He said he believed two other people from “a completely different operation” were in custody in the back of the ICE vehicle when the driver began pursuing Parra-Hernández, and that his office was working to ensure they remained in the country to provide evidence as material witnesses. “I’ve worked with authorities for 20 years. There’s not a single agency in the U.S. that teaches that once you put people in custody in your car, you start going after other people,” Teare said. “Every single person out there [was] “His team, he added, had gathered evidence that “goes beyond” the surveillance video broadcast by multiple local media outlets, and created a portal for 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 from The Guardian. Over the weekend, an agency spokesperson said the target of the early morning operation was another man, José Mendoza-Cervantes, an undocumented immigrant with multiple prior arrests and a final arrest warrant. removal signed by a judge. At a news conference on Monday, Kim Bruno, Parra-Hernández’s attorney, and César Espinosa, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Fiel Houston, told reporters that he had never met Mendoza-Cervantes. Bruno said his client fled because he did not know who was in the dark-colored vehicle that did not use lights or a siren. “The men and women of ICE are entrusted with defending the rule of law and are held to the highest standards of professionalism, integrity and ethical conduct,” the spokesperson said.
