Wilber Garces Perez took a bullet in the back from an ICE agent on September 20th in Austin, Texas. Nine days later it’s Garces Perez facing a criminal charge rather than the man who shot him.
Federal prosecutors have hit him with one count of assaulting, resisting, and impeding a federal officer. Why not also charge him with not giving back the bullet ICE lodged near his spine?
Garces Perez showed up to his hearing in a wheelchair with his arm in a sling, and the government’s response was to argue he’s a flight risk, which a judge agreed with, while at least declining to call him a danger to the community. I mean, it’s the least the judge could do, right?
While the courts sort that out, two very different pictures of this man’s health are circulating. His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, says that as of this week he still has the bullet in him, was dizzy and in considerable pain, and hadn’t been given any pain medication. Representative Greg Casar visited him and said much the same, describing him as in high spirits but in pain and in need of surgery he hasn’t gotten.
DHS, for its part, keeps pointing reporters back to a week-old statement claiming he’s receiving round-the-clock medical care, pain medication included. Both of those things cannot be true at the same time, and only one side here has anything to gain by lying about it.
Then there’s the matter of the bodycam, or rather the lack of one. Two agents were involved in this stop, and by every account, only one of them was wearing a camera at all. Depending on which outlet you read, that camera either got turned off at some point during the pursuit or simply wasn’t on the agent who did the shooting in the first place.
Either way, the man who actually fired the gun managed to do it without a lens anywhere near him, and at this point I have to assume that’s not bad luck. It’s starting to look like standard operating procedure for these shootings. Somebody’s camera is always broken, off, pointed the wrong way, or worn by the one guy who didn’t pull the trigger.
As for what actually happened on the streets of Austin, the newest accounts fill in some gaps while opening up new ones. Agents say they were running license plates through a database outside a restaurant and spotted that Garces Perez had a final order of removal. They say they identified themselves as immigration officers, and Garces Perez handed over his Texas driver’s license without a fight.
From there, the two sides start disagreeing, and not about small things, either. Garces Perez and the agents give conflicting accounts of when the emergency lights actually came on and whether the officers struck his vehicle first. He didn’t get out of the car when they told him to, and at some point, he drove off.
We also have updated information about Garces Perez’s immigration history. He entered the country legally through a port of entry in San Ysidro, California, back in December of 2023, and applied for asylum through the CBP One app the way the government told him to. He received a removal order in August of 2025 that his attorney says went to the wrong address, and a motion to reconsider it was denied this past July. His work permit, which he’d gotten through that same legal process, expired in December 2025.
None of that reads like a man gaming the system. It reads like a man who followed the instructions he was given and still ended up with paperwork working against him through no fault of his own.
None of it, by the way, means Wilber Garces Perez deserved to get shot in the back. And none of it means he deserved to be pulled out of a hospital and handed to ICE three hours after the shooting with the bullet still lodged in him.
Whatever he did or didn’t do during that stop, running from police is not supposed to come with a death sentence or a spinal injury attached. Municipal police departments in this country generally don’t open fire on a car just because it takes off from a traffic stop. That’s not some bleeding-heart policy choice. It’s because shooting at a moving vehicle on a public street can kill or maim anybody who happens to be standing nearby, and departments that actually care about civilian safety know better than to treat a fleeing car like a justified target.
So what exactly was the “assault” that’s going to follow Garces Perez around for the rest of this case? According to the complaint, it was his side-view mirror clipping an agent in the torso as he drove away.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard this song time and time again. DHS loves nothing more than turning a car into a weapon after the fact. You know, the infamous ‘weaponized vehicle.’ Here, a car mirror brushing someone’s side is apparently enough to justify a bullet in a man’s back and a felony charge on top of it.
Again, it’s funny how the vehicle only becomes weaponized once an ICE agent puts a bullet in someone for no reason.
(Sources)
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