If you’re just tuning in, here’s where we left off. On September 20th, an ICE agent shot Wilber Garces Perez in the back in Austin, Texas while the 28-year-old Venezuelan man was out on a DoorDash shift. Agents say they spotted his final removal order while running plates, and what began as a traffic stop turned into an eight-minute pursuit through residential neighborhoods that ended near Research Boulevard and Anderson Square, where the bullet went in.
He was released from the hospital into ICE custody a few hours later with that bullet still lodged near his spine, his attorneys spent a night unable to find him, and DHS responded with a statement about his paperwork rather than the shooting. Eleven days passed before he got surgery to have the bullet removed, and that only happened after his lawyers and the Texas Civil Rights Project kept the pressure on.
Now comes the insult to go with the injury. A federal grand jury has indicted him on one count of assaulting, resisting, impeding, and obstructing a federal officer, which carries up to twenty years in federal prison if he’s convicted. According to the indictment, he “used a motor vehicle as a deadly and dangerous weapon,” a phrase regular readers will recognize from just about every ICE shooting involving a car, since a vehicle apparently becomes a weapon the moment an agent needs a reason to open fire.
Strangely, the indictment doesn’t lay out a single detail of what actually happened on September 20th, so the facts still live in the complaint and in whatever prosecutors say in court. A federal judge has already found probable cause, which is a famously low bar, and denied him bond, so the man who took a bullet in the back is staying locked up while the case moves forward.
According to the complaint, the assault boils down to his side-view mirror clipping an agent in the torso as he drove away from the stop. Nothing in the public record says how those two agents approached him, and by his own account an unmarked SUV was sideswiping his car before he understood who was on the road with him. But given how these operations have gone around the country, with agents in plain clothes, unmarked vehicles, and faces that are often covered, it isn’t hard to picture a man deciding that getting away from a swarm of aggressive strangers was the safest move on the table.
Maybe there wouldn’t have been any “assault” at all if overly aggressive masked agents in civilian clothes hadn’t come charging at his car in the first place. He has reportedly acknowledged ignoring orders to park and get out, which is not something anyone should be shot in the back for, and fleeing a stop is a far cry from a deliberate attack on a federal officer.
At his hearing, prosecutors played ICE body camera footage that they say shows the mirror striking the agent, followed by the eight-minute pursuit. His defense team says the footage doesn’t make clear whether the mirror touched anyone at all, so the government’s central claim rests on video that the two sides read in opposite ways. I’m just amazed there is actual bodycam footage.
Austin police have released a dashcam clip from an off-duty detective and body camera video from a responding officer, and neither shows the shooting. Of all the moments in this story that deserved a clear camera angle, the one where a man got shot in the back is the one moment nobody has shown us.
Meanwhile, the Austin Police Department is trying to run its own investigation and getting stonewalled by the same federal government that’s busy prosecuting the man its agent shot. Chief Lisa Davis says APD has made several calls to its federal partners and received nothing, though she says she’s “still hopeful,” the kind of optimism you only hear from someone who’s been ignored more than once. A request to the U.S. attorney’s office about whether any evidence has been handed over is still pending, which is a polite way of saying nobody’s answering.
Worst of all, the public has no idea where Garces Perez is right now. He’s in federal custody with bond denied, and his defense team says it needs to meet with him before it will say where he’s being held, so a man who just had a bullet cut out of his back is effectively off the map while the case against him moves along.
I also want to remind everybody of something that DHS hopes you’ll forget every time it throws around the word “illegal.” Immigration cases are civil matters, not criminal ones, and the difference is not a technicality. In a criminal case, the government accuses you of a crime, and because your liberty is on the line, you get a presumption of innocence, a right to a lawyer even if you can’t afford one, a jury, and a prosecutor who has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
A removal case, by contrast, is a civil proceeding run through immigration courts that sit inside the Justice Department, where there’s no jury, no government-appointed attorney, and a much lower bar for the government, because the question on the table is only whether a person is allowed to stay, not whether he should be punished.
Detention in a civil case is supposed to be administrative and nonpunitive, not a stand-in for a sentence. Garces Perez’s removal order, the thing DHS keeps waving around, came out of one of those civil proceedings after a hearing notice went to the wrong address.
The assault charge is a separate criminal matter, to be fair, but it’s one prosecutors assembled after their own agent had already fired.
Whatever you think of immigration enforcement, a civil case is not supposed to end with a man shot in the back, handed back to the same agency that shot him, and held somewhere nobody can find him. That is not how civil matters are supposed to work in a free and open democracy, and it should scare everybody, whether or not you’ve ever worried about immigration.
What bothers me most is how tidy it all is for the people holding the power. The man who was shot is the one under indictment, the agent who fired is known to the public only by initials, the evidence is sitting in federal hands, and the local police chief can’t get a phone call returned. Maybe a stonewalled police department, a congressman, and a growing pile of lawyers and civil rights groups asking the same questions will finally be enough to force some daylight on this.
I’m hoping a reckoning for these jackbooted thugs in ICE is coming soon, and the longer they dodge it, the more it looks like they know exactly what they did was illegal.
Leave a Reply