Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway.
As we covered last week, ICE officers deliberately ran over a fleeing man before issuing self-serving statements that not only didn’t tell the truth about the incident, but apparently didn’t even tell the truth about the backstory.
To refresh your memory, here’s the footage of the incident ICE subsequently lied about, as captured by a camera owned by a nearby business:
In this, you’ll see an ICE vehicle accelerate into the parking lot and run over Miguel Parra-Hernandez. This does not appear to be an accident. To make things even more suspect, ICE officers then moved the truck Parra-Hernandez was driving from the street where it was stopped to near the entrance of the parking lot, apparently hoping to shore up the narrative it had delivered to reporters earlier.
ICE alleged in a statement that “Parra-Hernandez ran in front of an ICE vehicle and was struck.”
ABC13 reached out to an ICE spokesperson, who said agents were attempting to arrest Jose Mendoza-Cervantes, who was their intended target.
ICE alleges Mendoza-Cervantes entered the United States illegally from Mexico five times and had a final order of removal issued by a judge. The agency also alleges Parra-Hernandez is in the country illegally.
The only demonstrably true part of this statement was the fact that the man had been “struck” by “an ICE vehicle.” But the vehicle had to cross a street, aim itself at Parra-Hernandez, and accelerate in order to strike him. At no point was the man “running in front” of an ICE vehicle, unless you consider being struck in the back by an ICE vehicle to be exactly the same thing as “ran in front.” And there’s no legitimate reason for moving the “suspect” vehicle to the parking lot, especially since the running over of a person had turned the entire area into a crime scene.
And it is a crime scene. Responding local officers appeared to believe it was. And their suspicions were echoed by local prosecutors, who are now publicly stating the running over of Parra-Hernandez was a criminal act.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer appeared to intentionally drive a vehicle into a Mexican construction worker in Houston then fled the scene, a prosecutor said Wednesday, rejecting the agency’s claim the man stepped in front of the vehicle while running from authorities.
[…]
[Harris County District Attorney Sean] Teare said ICE already had two detainees in the SUV — a Jeep Cherokee — when it ran over Parra Hernandez, and his office will get statements from both of them before making a charging decision, likely next week.
His office spoke with Parra Hernandez on Tuesday in the hospital.
“What I’ve seen so far indicates to me that this agent intentionally struck this person and ran him over,” Teare said.
The other part of the ICE statement is equally meaningless. Any time ICE officers kill, maim, or engage in violence against people, officials always claim these were the inevitable result of ICE engaging in “targeted” arrest efforts. But plenty of cops — even some of the worst ones — can affect arrests without killing or injuring people, much less accelerating hundreds of feet to run over someone who is fleeing.
What makes this even more meaningless is that the alleged target of this failed arrest attempt is most likely not even alive.
When immigration agents struck a man with an S.U.V. in Houston over the weekend, they said they were chasing an undocumented Mexican man facing deportation and multiple criminal charges. But the photo they shared of their target was of a man whose family says he died almost a decade ago.
[…]
That day, ICE released a photo of the man they said they were seeking and said he had not been captured.
But Jamie Jimenez, of Dallas, said the man in the photo was her father and that he died in 2017. He plunged to his death from a cliff as he fled immigration agents near the southern border, she said.
While there are some complicating factors here, including the fact that one suspect ICE may have been seeking used this dead man’s name as an alias, there’s little reason to believe ICE did anything more than search a database and self-issue an administrative warrant.
First off, the name in the ICE statement is wrong. The photo it released appears to match the dead man: Jose Jimenez-Mendoza. The name ICE used in its statement is close, but definitely isn’t the same: Jose Mendoza-Cervantes. The fact that Jimenez-Mendoza had faced the same criminal charges as the named suspect in the ICE statement — DUI and unlawful possession of a firearm — strongly suggests ICE didn’t do any due diligence and just decided to go after whoever it managed to find that had a name close to the search results, rather than actually try to find the right suspect to arrest.
None of this would ever have come to light either if ICE officers had decided to operate like public servants, rather than rogue operatives who answer to no one. And if there’s body cam footage of this attempted vehicular manslaughter, odds are we’ll never see it. And that’s a big if. Chances are no footage exists, even if the officers were equipped with the now-mandatory cameras.
What’s undeniably true is that ICE officers ran over someone and that the footage of the incident very strongly suggests this act was deliberate. And all the government has now is an immigrant who wasn’t even on its radar facing multiple surgeries to repair his leg and another guy the government doesn’t even know the name of who managed to successfully flee the scene. What it doesn’t have is any legitimate arrest or anything that might possibly justify its actions.