Houston ICE crash: Initial suspect named, remains wanted

Good afternoon and welcome back to Houston Live and Local. Well, immigration advocates say they have new witnesses and information from the ICE incident that happened over the weekend. You may have seen it all over your social media when an agent hit a man with a car, ran over him, and he wasn't even the suspect, not the intended target. Still, they haven't caught the suspect. The man they say they still have in custody came in illegally. Angie Rodriguez has the latest for us What have you learned Angie? Hey Coco, yeah, there is a lot of information that we just learned from the press conference that happened earlier this morning that was hosted and organized by Field Houston that is a nonprofit here in the Houston area that works with immigrants in the city. We also just got a statement from ICE themselves. Their spokesperson did give us some more information as well, so we do know and can confirm that that the person that ICE was targeting both from Field Houston and ICE have been able to confirm that the man ICE was targeting was named Jose Mendoza Cervantes that is none of the people that were involved in this incident now Field Houston they say that there was two people detained inside of the vehicle that ICE unmarked vehicle that was used during that incident where they crashed into Miguel Barrera Hernandez during a chase that means there are two witnesses in addition we also know there are two other witnesses according to Field Houston they say there was one other witness inside of the vehicle with Miguel before he got out and started to run and then a person that was just in the street observing the incident so there's a according to Field Houston a total of four new witnesses that are going to be speaking about this giving us more information they're also Field Houston is also wondering if there is any body camera video why it hasn't been released yet if it's going to be released if they were wearing body cameras at all those ICE officers there is a lot of information that we learned earlier this morning but that does almost include those four witnesses coming forward now so just again to reiterate four new witnesses that includes one man who was with Miguel Barrera Hernandez in the vehicle before he Miguel had gotten out and started running before he was hit in that video as you can see that man's name is Omar then there were two people inside of that unmarked ICE vehicle one of them is named Luis the other we don't have a name for yet and then one other person who was just in the street during the time of the incident now the investigation is still continuing and like i said we did hear from ICE i just received a statement not too long ago they said and i'm going to read this directly just from their statement they said at approximately 8 30 on october 10th in the morning ICE was conducting a targeted enforcement operation in harris county to arrest Jose Mendoza Cervantes they say he was illegally in the country from mexico and that he had four prior arrests for driving under the influence and then arrest for an unlawful possession of a firearm. Now again, that is a different person than we know any of those four that were involved in this incident. Whenever we heard from Field Houston earlier this morning, they asked both the witnesses' families and Miguel's families whether they had ever heard of this man, Jose Mendoza Cervantes, and all of them said, no, no, we've never met this man before. we don't recognize who this is so a lot of information that continues to come out again but the latest that we have is those four new witnesses coming forward we'll continue to keep you updated right here on Fox Local we do know that Field Houston is also working on getting some legal representation to be able to get those witnesses UBSAs in order to be part of the investigation, give their testimony for the Harris County Sheriff's Office and the District Attorney's Office as well. Coco? So Angie, have they said anything? Have any of the witnesses been able to say what they saw or what they experienced yet? Yeah, Coco, we didn't hear directly from the witnesses themselves. It's still part of the investigation from what we heard earlier this morning from Field Houston is they don't really want to go into too much detail because this investigation is still ongoing they're still still working on getting those finalizations those really small details that they want to include all we know is that four witnesses have come forward we've been able to identify two out of the four so it looks like they're still working on getting more information out to the public and then Field Houston also said they were working on hopefully getting one of them to actually one of those witnesses to speak And it seems like they're trying to get him to speak this upcoming Friday. So a lot of moving parts to this. All right. Well, we can't wait to get all of the details because, you know, I know that people want to know what's going on out there and really be transparent with the investigation. So thank you so much. Angie Rodriguez live for us there with the latest.