Yesterday afternoon, an ICE officer shot a 28-year-old Wilber Garces Perez in Austin, Texas. I’m getting awfully tired of writing that sentence with a different city name attached each time.
By Monday morning, the man had been discharged from a hospital, swept into federal custody, and lost to his own attorneys for the better part of a night. Somewhere in there, the government found time to issue a statement about his paperwork, yet not why one of its officers decided to shoot him.
Here’s what we know, which isn’t much, and nearly all of it comes from local officials and the family’s lawyers rather than from the agency whose officer pulled the trigger. This started as a car chase. The Texas Department of Public Safety says ICE asked for help with a vehicle pursuit around 12:50 p.m. By the time troopers arrived, the shooting was already over. Afterward, a dark blue Toyota Corolla sat under an overpass with damage to its passenger-side door and what appeared to be bullet holes until it was towed away in the early evening.
Since a car was involved with an ICE shooting, I’m just waiting for DHS to say this was another case of a “weaponized vehicle.” They haven’t said that about this Corolla, at least not yet. The phrase has been trotted out so often that I can’t help wondering whether DHS has pre-printed forms where the term has already been filled in.
The car chase wasn’t the whole story, either. Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis says she was told a foot pursuit came before the shooting, which means that at some point the Corolla stopped and Wilber Garces Perez got out and ran.
Early on, the EMS chief said he didn’t know whether the man was shot in the back, as rumored, and nobody else with a badge or a podium was volunteering. Then the Austin American-Statesman got hold of a video taken at the scene, which the paper independently verified, and it shows Garces Perez sitting in the driver’s seat of a blue Toyota after the shooting, with two federal immigration officers standing beside him.
Two Austin police officers arrive; one asks whether EMS is on the way, and an ICE agent confirms that it is. Garces Perez is then handcuffed and sat on the curb while an Austin officer cuts his shirt open, exposing one bleeding bullet wound in his back, directly below the nape of his neck.
That kind of conflicts with the foot chase story, since a man in the driver’s seat isn’t running anywhere, and the video doesn’t capture the moment of the shot itself, so what happened between the car door and that wound is still anybody’s guess.
So I’ll ask what DHS won’t. Were these more “defensive shots”? The agent is welcome to explain how a bullet ended up there, but until he does, I’ll say it plainly. Only cowards shoot people in the back.
As for Garces Perez himself, we know a lot more from his attorney than from anyone in the federal government. Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, the Austin immigration lawyer now representing his family, says Garces Perez came to this country from Venezuela a couple of years ago seeking asylum, has a valid work permit, and was working as a food delivery driver when this all began. She also says he has a son with a disability, and that he works to cover the expensive treatment and tests. According to what his wife told her, he has no criminal history and has no idea why he was stopped. His wife had also asked him not to go to work on Sunday because she wanted to spend the day with him, but he really wanted to go out and earn some money.
That’s our dangerous menace to society. A guy who wouldn’t take a Sunday off. Take all of that with the appropriate grain of salt since the criminal history claim is secondhand and the rest comes from his attorney, but nothing about a man out delivering people’s dinner to help pay for his kid’s medical care screams public safety threat to me.
Roughly three and a half hours after the shooting, around 4:30 p.m., Garces Perez was released from the hospital and handed over to ICE. His wife went looking for him at the hospital, and when she came back with her attorney after a stop at the shooting scene, they were told he wasn’t there and were asked to leave the property.
It took Austin Mayor Kirk Watson getting involved before a hospital attorney called to say he’d actually been released to ICE custody, and even then the family had no information about his condition, his treatment, or where he’d been taken. Hours of that passed with his wife hearing reports that he was dead.
By 8 a.m. Monday, fifteen hours after he left the hospital, attorney Kristen Etter told the Statesman he still hadn’t turned up in the databases lawyers normally use to find someone in federal custody, which she called highly unusual.
About an hour later, she confirmed he’s being held at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, roughly 135 miles southwest of Austin. Lincoln-Goldfinch says he spent Sunday night on the floor with no pain medication, that he’s being held there for interrogation, and that the bullet is still lodged in his body. God only knows what kind of medical care a man with a gunshot wound will get in a place like that, or whether he’ll get any at all.
And what did the Department of Homeland Security have to say for itself? Its statement, posted to X, the preferred platform of fascists, at 11:33 Sunday night, managed to say almost nothing about the shooting and quite a lot about the victim’s immigration history. He was, according to DHS, an “illegal alien” from Venezuela who came in under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal, and now he was stable and in federal custody pending removal.
It’s the classic move of this administration. When in doubt, blame Joe Biden, as though the former president were riding shotgun in that Corolla.
Nowhere did the statement say why Garces Perez was stopped, whether he was armed, whether the car was used as a weapon, or what the agent believed was happening when the trigger got pulled. It did, however, promise that the situation is “developing,” which is the government’s way of saying it will tell us what it wants us to know when it feels like it.
The investigation, meanwhile, is being led by Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of ICE, with the FBI assisting, so ICE is essentially checking its own homework. DHS is probably hoping for a case of “We’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.”
Then on Monday, Lincoln-Goldfinch announced that Garces Perez has a valid work permit and came here seeking asylum, which flatly contradicts the DHS version, and DHS hadn’t responded to the Statesman’s request for comment.
Then there’s the small matter of evidence. Congressman Greg Casar has demanded the immediate release of any body camera footage, and that’s a fine demand, but nobody has said whether the agent was wearing a camera in the first place. The only video that has been made public so far is the one taken at the scene that shows the aftermath rather than the shot.
We also don’t know who the agent is, or even whether the shooter was one of the two officers standing next to Garces Perez in that video. Mayor Watson, when asked whether the agent was still in town, said flatly that he didn’t know, adding that he hoped an agent involved in a shooting wouldn’t leave the city and certainly not the state.
Casar has gone further and wants the agent suspended and kept in Austin, which tells you how much confidence anyone has in the DHS honor system here.
Anyone who’s been following this blog remembers how that hope has worked out before. Christian Castro, the agent in the Minneapolis snow shovel “ambush,” was eventually tracked down in Texas, and the last time DHS handed us a tidy story about a shooting, it involved a shovel and a broom handle and fell apart the moment the footage came out. For what it’s worth, Travis County District Attorney José Garza has said it’s possible this incident included violations of state law, so at least somebody with prosecutorial power is paying attention.
Even if Wilber Garces Perez were here illegally, no person is illegal, by the way; he still didn’t deserve to be shot while doing his job. There’s a process for enforcing immigration law, and it has never required putting a bullet in a delivery driver on a Sunday.
Wilber Rafael Garces Perez went out to earn money for his family, and by Monday, according to his attorney, he had spent the night on a floor with no pain medication and a bullet still inside him. Nothing to see here, folks, just a “developing situation.”
(Sources)
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