The shooting of a man by a federal officer on Sunday in Texas ruptured an ostensibly quiet afternoon amid an immigration enforcement surge in Austin. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been very active in the Texas capital of late, although less showy than the militarized federal violence in Minneapolis this January, helping keep the operation effective but flying under the national radar. Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was in the process of delivering a DoorDash food order on the city’s north side when ICE encountered him shortly before 1pm.
Video posted online appears to show an ICE officer getting out of his car and shooting at Garcés Pérez’s car three times. His car, as later visible at the scene, had a large dent on the front passenger side. Garcés Pérez, who was hit once in the back between his shoulder blades, is a Venezuelan national who has lived in the United States for two years, according to his lawyer, but had been ordered removed from the US.
Garcés Pérez told onlookers who rushed to the scene that he had been shot because he hadn’t stopped. Austin police officers who arrived could be seen in bystander footage rendering first aid to the bleeding man, while ICE officers stood back. Garcés Pérez was taken to a downtown hospital for treatment but, according to lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, was whisked away from there by ICE late Sunday afternoon.
For a few hours, his partner and the lawyer could not locate him, then on Monday morning Lincoln-Goldfinch told the Guardian he’d been located at the South Texas ICE Processing Center, located 140 miles to the south-west, in Pearsall. No pain meds,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said by text on Monday. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about the circumstances leading up to the shooting, or Garcés Pérez’s whereabouts and condition.
Austin, the politically liberal capital city of conservative Texas, has repeatedly found itself at the crossfire of the immigration debate. The state’s Republican leadership has often sought to make an example out of the city, forcing local leaders to weaken Austin’s policy of not collaborating with ICE. For more than a year, state police have handed countless unauthorized immigrants over to ICE during traffic stops, but the city police had not joined in.
Cooperation between state or local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement is arranged under so-called 287(g) agreements, which have been proliferating in the second Trump administration, especially in states such as Texas and Florida. But even with that, some local leaders said this summer has marked a low-profile but aggressive surge in immigration enforcement in the region, spurred by a jump in ICE acting alone rather than relying on state troopers to stop people and pass them on. Lawmakers reported ICE stopping cars in traffic or asking people about their immigration status in public sites like parking lots and gas stations.
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