A woman from El Salvador assaulted a Border Patrol agent after the agent refused to handcuff her husband to her instead of another man on Saturday, according to a criminal complaint.
Crissa Mirelly Salas-Guevara, who was born in 1994, is accused of clawing and scratching an agent’s face.
However, she also alleged in the affidavit that an agent hit her in the face.
About 9:50 p.m. Saturday, an agent was patrolling an area near Havana, TX, when he was told there were five people in the brush and found them in the median of Highway 83 near Sam Fordyce Road, the complaint said.
The agent called out to them in Spanish and detained the group, which included Guevara and her husband, Pablo Ernesto Sales-Guevara.
A while later, a second agent arrived to help and tried to handcuff Pablo Ernesto to another detained man, but he refused to comply and demanded to be handcuffed to his wife, the complaint said.
According to the affidavit, the couple verbally protested the agent’s actions to the point that an agent felt the need to place Pablo Ernesto inside his unit, and as he tried to handcuff his hands behind his back, Pablo Ernesto resisted. So both agents placed him on the ground.
The complaint says Crissa Mirelly had to be pushed away three times before she eventually reached over to the second agent’s head, clawed at his face, scratched him and pulled his head back.
The agent then shoved Crissa Mirelly and she fell and hit her head on a rock, the affidavit said.
She then complained she was assaulted by both agents and a U.S. Border Patrol supervisor, who arrived shortly after and documented her allegations, the complaint said.
The affidavit says that one of the individuals in the detained group told authorities that Crissa Mirelly attempted to help her husband when the two agents were struggling to place him in the border patrol unit.
She made a first appearance Tuesday in McAllen federal court in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Nadia S. Medrano, who ordered her held without bond pending court hearings scheduled for later this week, court records indicate.
