When Mario Morales joined Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August of last year, his resume wasn’t exactly stacked with accolades and training certificates.
The 33-year-old now faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a charge stemming from an October 10 incident in which Morales appeared, according to prosecutors who studied surveillance and body camera footage, to steer his unmarked vehicle toward a fleeing Mexican immigrant and run over the man’s legs.
The incident prompted critics who already want ICE out of Houston to reignite their campaign against the federal agency, but it left some saying that perhaps the immigration officers simply don’t have adequate training. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is notoriously non-transparent when it comes to sharing how they vet the men and women they put on the front lines and the continuing education classes, if any, they require.
Greg Fremin, a criminal Justice professor at the University of Houston Downtown, spent 34 years with the Houston Police Department and retired as a captain in 2017. He spoke with the Houston Press on Monday specifically about the incident that has Morales facing prison time and speculated on whether intense training and simulated scenarios could have prevented such an occurrence.
Fremin says he believes there should be a mechanism by which violent criminals who are in the United States illegally can be removed but he’s not sure ICE is training its agents on standard law enforcement protocols.
“I have serious concerns about their tactics and the strategies that they are engaging in for these young ICE agents,” he says. “We’re placing them in a large urban environment and they’re engaging in felony traffic stops. We don’t teach our police officers to do these things that they’re doing right now and as we’ve seen, it’s very counterproductive.”
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has also said that violent criminals should be deported but emphasizes that just because someone has a badge doesn’t mean they get to break the law.
Teare announced the indictment against Morales last week and his office is also independently investigating Gregory Feathers, the ICE agent who fatally shot Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in the Magnolia Park neighborhood on July 7.
In a statement issued over the weekend, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Aaron Reitz, who made a failed bid for attorney general earlier this year, said Teare appears to be “disappointed in his inability to swiftly bring charges in the tragic Salgado shooting in July” and has instead become “determined to put a different federal agent’s scalp on the wall.”
“Federal agents should not be turned into political trophies for doing the difficult and dangerous work of enforcing federal law. We stand with ICE and all of our federal law enforcement partners,” Reitz said.
Who is Mario Morales?
Morales, a Brownsville native and Hanna High School graduate, served in the U.S. Army for about two years, then worked as a prison guard for a state facility in Beeville, where he was disciplined for “falsification of records, specifically documenting security rounds as completed when they were not conducted,” according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
He was on probation with the prison system when he resigned that job in 2018. He’d also worked at the Cameron County Jail when he was 19 years old and applied for a job with the U.S. Border Patrol several years ago but was rejected. He made a failed bid for a Congressional seat in Brownsville last year.
While running for Congress as a Republican under his Army nickname, “Bam,” Morales wrote on X that laws must be followed and so-called sanctuary cities punished.
“I am glad that President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill removes federal funding from cities that choose not to enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” he said in a social media post at the time. He raised about $17,000 but dropped out of the race when Mayra Flores, who briefly considered a bid in another district, returned to the 34th, where Morales was competing.
When President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security launched its Operation Metro Surge program last year, deploying hundreds of ICE agents in large cities across the country to aggressively deport violent criminals, Morales signed up and got the job.
He was hired as a deportation officer, responsible for “identifying, arresting, detaining and removing people who are subject to immigration enforcement,” according to the job description.
A search of the USAJobs site on Monday showed 194 available positions across the country under the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE division. The jobs include deportation officer, criminal investigator, human resources specialist, attorney, historian, and “mission support specialist.”
The position of detention and deportation officer has a salary range of $107,000 to $139,000. A background check for “suitability and fitness” is required; no criminal background check is mentioned on the website, although it states that candidates are required to carry a firearm and will be disqualified if they have been convicted of a domestic violence charge.
“Previous experience in a primary (rigorous) law enforcement position (or equivalent outside the Federal Government) is a prerequisite” for a deportation officer, the website states. It’s unclear how the DHS defines a primary or rigorous law enforcement agency.
The job description lists several courses as required training, including Basic Immigration Law Enforcement Training. Fremin said he doesn’t know how long the training courses are, whether they’re available online or if the officers have a set time frame in which to complete them.
Morales’ attorneys with the law firm Gregor Wynne Arney PLLC were by their client’s side as he surrendered to authorities Monday morning. The lawyers issued a statement saying that no crime was committed and the indictment was political theater orchestrated by Teare. The lawyers claim that Morales dedicated his entire adult life to public service and note in their statement that he completed federal law enforcement academy training, FEMA incident command coursework, and first aid and CPR certification.
But based on the 911 call that Teare played for reporters last week, Morales didn’t render any aid to Miguel Parra-Hernandez, the fleeing man who suffered a badly broken leg after Morales ran over him with his SUV. Teare also maintains that Morales lied and told the dispatcher that Parra-Hernandez “hit my car” when the surveillance video appears to show Morales steering toward the man.
Other red flags that demonstrate what prosecutors say is a lack of training include that Morales was on the immigration sting by himself and that he had two other detainees in the backseat at the time of his collision with Parra-Hernandez.
Teare said last week he has not obtained all of Morales’ training records and is unaware if he has any such documents, but he has reviewed his work history and said, “I’m not familiar with a single law enforcement agency that would hire this person.”
Fremin says ICE may have “gone back to the training cycle” after facing widespread criticism for shooting civilians and immigrants who had no criminal history and no active deportation order, but no one really knows what their training requirements are because they’re not transparent with that information.
“We don’t teach our officers to stand in front of vehicles with their guns drawn,” Fremin says. “That’s a fireable offense, almost, here in Houston. Those are just very dangerous tactics to use. It’s a very precarious situation when you’re trying to pull somebody over and you’re in an unmarked vehicle. I understand the dynamics. ICE can’t have markings on their cars. It would just be too dangerous, but there are a lot of tactical questions that ICE is trying to close the gap on.”
While serving for decades as an HPD officer, Fremin says he knew of some incidents in which an officer struck a suspect with a vehicle in an effort to stop them from getting away. “That was only done under very exigent circumstances,” he says. “A fleeing suspect was an imminent threat to the public. He had just committed a violent felony. Can we use a vehicle to stop a suspect? Yes, we can, but only under certain circumstances.”
Fremin’s assessment of the surveillance video in Morales’ case was that the ICE agent “intentionally swerved his vehicle to hit that suspect.”
“I had great concerns about what he did and the tactics he used, and obviously a grand jury did too,” Fremin said. “Based on what I have seen, it appears that a criminal violation occurred. It looked like he intentionally struck the individual, who was critically injured. That concerns me greatly. I think there is validity to that charge.”
Training Requirements
Fremin said he heard earlier this year, after several ICE shootings occurred across the country, that the traffic stops would be halted until officers could get more training. He said Monday he’s not sure if that message made it to the Houston ICE bureau.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen any data. We’re very immune from what ICE does. They don’t communicate with the Houston Police Department and say, for example, that they’re going to be conducting operations in the East End today. Not to my knowledge.”
After the Salgado shooting, Houston Mayor John Whitmire called for an end to ICE traffic stops until federal agents could get body cameras and dash cameras and undergo specific training on vehicle stops and de-escalation.
Fremin says he’s been contacted several times by DHS regarding applications for government jobs that his students applied for. The third-party vendor conducting background checks wouldn’t disclose what job the applicants were seeking, but Fremin said he later learned from the students they were applying to be ICE agents.
“It’s a very detailed, structured 30-minute interview about their background, qualifications, drug usage and thoughts about America,” he said. “I was very impressed with the level of detail they were going to in asking about the individual.”
He says there’s truth to the perception that ICE agents are often people who have been rejected from traditional law enforcement jobs; some of his students couldn’t get hired at HPD or DPS but are now working as ICE agents.
Fremin says that public trust could be restored, at least for some, if the federal government would revisit the order that immigration enforcement should target violent criminals and also be more transparent on how officers are trained.
“I think that would go a long way, because there’s a lot of people, including myself and other criminal justice practitioners, who want a little more transparency. Just let us know what’s going on. There’s a lot of distrust in the community, especially in the migrant community,” he said.
A Political Problem
Fremin says that immigration enforcement has been politicized by people who want to see an entire federal entity defunded and canceled. “If ICE isn’t allowed to do their job, then who is going to do the job of removing very dangerous people within the confines of America? It’s a very slippery slope when we start talking about removing them completely and it demonizes the work that they’re doing.”
Dangerous situations are created when people don’t follow commands of the federal agents, and they don’t follow those commands because they don’t trust the officers, Fermin explains. “It’s not going to end well,” he says. “That’s what’s happening. It’s been politicized by the left and the right, and you’ve got people out there advocating to disobey the officers’ commands. That’s not a good recipe for enforcement and the rule of law.”
He referenced the case of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old Harris County resident who was raped and killed in 2024. Undocumented Venezuelan immigrants Franklin Peña and Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel were charged with the crime, which received national media attention. They’re awaiting trial, and prosecutors have said they’ll seek the death penalty for both men.
“[They] should have been removed from this country years ago but they were allowed to remain in this country and in this city because of failed immigration policies and restrictions that were being placed on ICE,” Fremin said. “Her story is one of many. You’ve got some really bad actors that are in this country, and ICE is entrusted with removing these people.”
Fremin does not, however, support separating people from their families who have no criminal history, have lived in the United States for decades and “for whatever reason” have not completed their documentation paperwork. “I think that creates an undue hardship and I wish that could get fixed,” he says.
Fremin said it undermines the rule of law when people start choosing sides and fighting over whether the case is being evaluated by the appropriate jurisdiction.
“I don’t think that’s productive for anyone,” he said. “It’s not good for democracy.”
