He wears the bruises of a beaten man and bears the diagnosis of a brain hemorrhage that’s left him frightened, in pain and confused.Not much in Jose Mejia Hernandez’s life feels particularly clear right now, except for one thing — his desire for answers.How did he end up here? In a Virginia hospital? With ICE officers hovering nearby?“He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t remember anything that happened after he was tasered. He’s blank,” Mejia Hernandez’s attorney, Carlos Jurado, told HuffPost.The injuries Mejia Hernandez sustained on Aug. 11 were many and massive, Jurado explained. Both of the 45-year-old man’s eyes were blackened, lacerations etched his face and multiple stitches were needed to close shut deep cuts on his lips.Mejia Hernandez told Jurado that he recalled fleeing two men who burst out from a truck. Why they were chasing him is unclear — Mejia Hernandez did not have a removal order at the time of the alleged assault.Mejia Hernandez says that after finally waking up in the hospital, ICE officers never left his room and would often prevent him from questioning doctors or nurses. When he was able to ask someone for help, he claims medical staff said they had no information about how he had been injured. Only the quiet whispers of a Spanish-speaking nurse confirmed to him that he had a brain bleed, Jurado said.“There is absolutely no information on why this happened. He is not a violent man. He does not have an extensive criminal record. He had one contact with law enforcement for an open container from years back,” Jurado said. “There’s nothing violent on his record. There were no removal orders. Based on that… we think this is just a case of a brown man caught walking down the street.”As he fled in fear, Mejia Hernandez alleges he didn’t get far before something struck him hard in his back and he lost consciousness. When he came to, he was in a hospital bed with two ICE officers present.Neither agent would admit to knowing what happened to him, Jurado said.The Department of Homeland Security has denied any wrongdoing and denied the basics of Mejia Hernandez’s account.“Allegations that he was unconscious and woke up in a hospital bed are FALSE. According to officers, they rendered aide, asked the individual, who was responsive, if he was okay after evading arrest, and followed their training,” a DHS spokesperson emailed Tuesday.Leaving questions unanswered about aid given or whether incident reports or agent affidavits will be shared with investigators or eventually made public, the Department of Homeland Security told HuffPost only that Mejia Hernandez entered the U.S. illegally in 2006 and 2008 and was convicted of public intoxication in 2020.Regardless of a person’s citizenship status, ICE officers are not allowed to use excessive force; when they do, only “necessary and reasonable” force is permitted.The force used on Mejia Hernandez was far from necessary, Jurado said.“Mr. Mejia Hernandez is 4’11. He’s 125 pounds. This man is not a Division 1 athlete. This man gets up and goes to work every day. He doesn’t even have a gym membership. This is not a very strong man. What force did they really have to use to detain this man that is smaller than the average woman in America?” Jurado said.What happened to Mejia Hernandez, he said, is yet another example of a “broad issue in this country.”“I see a lot of these cases of excessive force and I can tell you this: Many times, from the inception of contact, the force is already excessive. Often there is no opportunity for people to even be able to react to them saying, ’Hey, stop, let me talk to you,” he said. “People are coming out of moving vehicles, tackling people to the ground.”As HuffPost reported in February, ICE training instructs officers to avoid harming people or risking their own or the public’s safety to conduct operations. But data shows excessive force has run rampant.A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union showed that of 1,200 immigration enforcement incidents reviewed, over 400 involved misconduct by ICE personnel, including pushing, shoving, deploying chemical munitions or using chokeholds that restrict breathing.Dozens of people have been killed by ICE officers or died in ICE custody during Trump’s second term. Time reported this month that ICE detention deaths are at a 22-year high.Though eager to launch a probe, Jurado told HuffPost that, for now, they are focused on Mejia’s health and recovery. A preliminary hearing weighing whether he might be deported will be held on Sept. 14 in Virginia.But there are still so many questions that must be answered, Jurado said.Hospitals where he was admitted have not responded to requests for comment.‘They don’t give a shit.’Discharged within 72 hours and allegedly without further explanation about his injuries, Mejia Hernandez said no one contacted his family to let them know he had been detained, let alone injured and hospitalized. His attorney said after discharge, he was given immigration forms to complete, a hearing date and fitted with an ankle monitor to track his location.That ankle monitor became its own massive headache, Jurado said. For days after his discharge from the hospital, Mejia Hernandez continued to feel unwell. He went to a second hospital and was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. But with the ankle monitor on, Jurado said doctors were unable to perform an immediate and complete evaluation of Mejia Hernandez.It wasn’t until Wednesday — more than a week since he was first hospitalized, Jurado told HuffPost — that Mejia Hernandez finally received an MRI.“He’s waiting for results and those could take another five to seven days to come back,” Jurado said. “It’s really troublesome that they aren’t taking care of him quickly. He still feels terrible and has terrible headaches… We waited in the hospital for four hours today.”Jurado said Mejia Hernandez has spent days being shuffled back and forth between immigration offices and doctors’ offices as they tried to negotiate the removal of the ankle monitor so he could receive an MRI. Yesterday, Jurado said, they spent nearly three hours in an immigration office waiting for the paperwork to be completed on the ankle monitor removal.“They can see it on his face what happened to him and they continue to put him through protocol like everyone else — which is sitting in that damn office for hours. When anyone even gets a mild concussion, they are told to lie in bed. Sometimes it takes days or weeks to get out of that state,” Jurado said. “They don’t give a shit. They keep telling him, ‘You just gotta keep coming.’”Calls for a probe into the alleged assault are mounting. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) has called on DHS to establish the facts and hold anyone responsible to account.At a press conference on Wednesday, Beyer said they are concerned about a particular “group of ICE agents” who have been in Virginia of late.Just a day before Mejia Hernandez was beaten, a northern Virginia woman and U.S. citizen, Carolina Molina, said ICE personnel pulled a gun on her during a traffic stop. Molina was going to an immigration office to drop off business cards when she saw ICE officers making arrests. Dashcam footage Molina shared publicly shows her being surrounded by ICE while in her vehicle. On approach, a gun is already drawn and pointed at her head. ICE has accused Molina of trying to run them over, according to ABC News. Molina said she feared for her life.“The fact that he’s walking to work at 6:30 in the morning and people pull up, immediately start running after him, he didn’t know who they were,” Beyer said of Mejia Hernandez on Wednesday. “We don’t yet know how he got so badly bruised. We’ve been interacting with the local commonwealth attorney… there’s much more to be discovered about this case. The real concern is it’s the same reckless, out-of-control agents who are causing havoc in our northern Virginia neighborhoods.”Jurado says he hopes to eventually make the names of the ICE officers public.Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, the Commonwealth of Virginia attorney for Arlington County, released a statement on Tuesday vowing that “no one is above the law” and said her office has “reached out” to the Arlington County Police Department as well as the Virginia Attorney General’s office for help to launch a probe.Requests for comment to both the ACPD and the attorney general’s office were not immediately returned Wednesday.“On the outside, you can see the bruises and everything he’s gone through physically,” Jurado told HuffPost. “But on the inside, he’s a broken man. He’s been treated less than human at all stages of this. He just wants to know what happened. That’s his biggest question: Who did this to me? Why did they do this to me?’ You can see the pain coming from his heart.”