By now you should know the basics. This past Sunday, ICE agents shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man working a DoorDash shift in North Austin, Texas, and put a bullet in his back that’s still lodged there because it’s too close to his spine to remove.
He spent Monday morning missing, then turned up at an ICE detention facility 135 miles away. The Department of Homeland Security called him an “illegal alien” without bothering to explain why one of its agents opened fire on him. Now Garces Perez himself has told his side of the story from inside that facility, and it makes the whole thing even more barbaric.
According to what Garces Perez told reporters by phone from the South Texas ICE Processing Center, he was driving his blue Toyota Camry when an unmarked SUV sideswiped him twice before he had any idea that ICE was involved. Nobody flashed a badge. No one hit a siren. As far as he knew, he was just a man being run off the road by a stranger. Wouldn’t you panic and try to get away if this was happening to you?
He did a U-turn under a freeway underpass, and the SUV hit him again. Only then did the lights and sirens come on to let him know it was federal agents doing the ramming. He asked if he could pull over somewhere safer than under an overpass in traffic. An agent told him no. Then he felt a shot hit his back.
There’s no foot chase in his version of events, none of the running-and-turning-around that Austin’s police chief had vaguely gestured at earlier in the week, and as far as we can tell now, there wasn’t one. He was behind the wheel of his own car, trying to find a stretch of road that wouldn’t get him or anyone else killed, when an agent decided that wasn’t good enough and put a bullet next to his spine anyway.
What makes this so infuriating is how much Garces Perez did right to get here in the first place. He entered the country legally in 2024 through the CBP One app, the Biden-era program that let people schedule appointments at a port of entry instead of crossing however they could. He was processed, he applied for asylum, and he got a work permit, which is the government’s own way of saying he was allowed to be here and allowed to work.
The one blemish on his record is that an immigration court sent his hearing notice to an old address after he’d already updated it. He never got word of the hearing, and a judge ordered him deported in absentia without him ever knowing it happened. His attorney, who’s been doing this work for twenty years, says that’s not some rare bureaucratic fluke. It’s something she sees happen to somebody almost daily. So the entire justification DHS reached for, the line about a “final order of removal,” boils down to a piece of mail that went to the wrong house.
That’s the slip-up. Not a crime, not a violent act, just a clerical error nobody told him about, and it’s apparently enough to get a man shot in the back by agents who, best anyone can tell, didn’t identify themselves and probably didn’t know his immigration status the moment they hit his car. They saw a brown man behind the wheel, and that was evidently reason enough to start ramming his vehicle before a single word was exchanged.
This is what “doing it the legal way” gets you now. Fill out the forms, make the appointment, get the work permit, follow every rule the government hands you, and you can still end up bleeding in the driver’s seat because a piece of mail went missing and some jackbooted thug decided sideswiping your car was step one of a traffic stop.
Then there’s what happened after the shooting, which somehow finds a way to be even more disgraceful. Garces Perez says doctors at the hospital told him they weren’t going to remove the bullet because it’s sitting too close to his spine. Fair enough, spinal surgery is not something you rush into, and I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. But leaving a bullet in a man’s back doesn’t mean the story ends there, and what came next says everything you need to know about ICE.
At 4 a.m., barely half a day after he was shot, he was transferred out of medical care and into a temporary processing facility, where he slept on a concrete floor. A congressional staffer who saw him at the detention center in Pearsall reported that he’d started losing feeling on the left side of his body, and another detainee told his attorney that officers had “handled Wilber roughly,” cuffing him, shackling his feet, and chaining his waist before hauling him off to a hospital.
Garces Perez put it plainly himself: “I’m not doing very well. I have not received the medical attention that I require.” A man with a bullet lodged next to his spine, losing feeling on one side of his body, is somebody’s medical emergency, not somebody’s paperwork problem to be shuffled between facilities at four in the morning.
Denying him adequate care isn’t just bad policy. It’s a violation of his human rights.
(Source)
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