As I’m sure you know, on September 20th, an ICE agent shot Wilber Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man working a DoorDash shift in North Austin, and put a bullet in his back. He was rushed to Dell Seton Medical Center, then handed off to ICE custody a few hours later with the bullet still inside him, and shipped to a detention facility more than a hundred miles from Austin.
From there, his attorneys spent days trying to even locate him, DHS put out a statement about his immigration paperwork instead of the shooting, and federal prosecutors eventually turned around and charged the man they’d shot with assaulting a federal officer. Through all of it, his legal team kept saying the same thing. He was in pain, he wasn’t getting proper treatment, and the bullet was still there.
Now, finally, it’s been removed. According to an update his wife shared with the Texas Civil Rights Project, Garces Perez has had surgery, and the bullet that had been sitting near his spine has been successfully removed. That’s genuinely good news for a man who’s spent the better part of two weeks dealing with an untreated gunshot wound while also fighting a federal case.
But let’s not hand out any medals to ICE just yet. Taking the bullet out of a man you shot isn’t above and beyond. It’s the floor, not the ceiling, and it took this long to get there only because his lawyers and a civil rights organization kept the pressure on and wouldn’t let the story quietly fade. ICE didn’t volunteer to do this. It got dragged there.
So now that the surgery’s done, he’s been handed right back to the U.S. Marshals Service to continue being prosecuted for the crime of getting shot.
I’m sure he’ll be receiving nothing but top-notch, attentive medical care from here on out, the same caliber of care that had him sitting with a bullet lodged next to his spine for over a week before anyone got around to fixing it.
Somehow I doubt the follow-up appointments are going to be any more of a priority than the first one was.
(Source)
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