ICE shot an Austin driver and left a bullet in his back

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · September 24, 2026

Federal agents rammed a Venezuelan worker and shot him in North Austin, then dumped him in detention without a bed or timely care.

A bullet in the back and an agency with the cameras off

Alma Cordero remembers what it looks like when the border comes for you. It happens on a Tuesday or a Sunday afternoon, when men in unmarked sport-utility vehicles treat your street as a staging ground and your life as disposable. The pavement in North Austin was still warm on September 20, 2026. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was making a DoorDash delivery run in his blue Toyota Camry down a road he thought belonged to working people. According to the reporting of The Texas Tribune and Fox News, an unmarked federal vehicle sideswiped his car twice before he realized the men trying to run him off the road were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He made a U-turn under a freeway underpass, hoping to find a safer place to stop. An agent shot him straight through the back. That is how the state handles a 28-year-old Venezuelan father who came through the CBP One app in 2024 to ask for asylum. They hunt him like an animal, leave a bullet lodged near his spine to fracture his clavicle, and blame him for trying to live.

The recruit who pulled the trigger had been with the agency for just a year. Like too many foot soldiers in this sprawling security state, he chose to leave his issued body camera turned off. Another agent had a camera rolling, but it conveniently failed to capture the moment a human being was shot down in the middle of traffic. This is the exact machinery of the Death of Sandra Bland—a routine traffic stop of a person of color in Texas that rapidly escalated into state custody violence, followed immediately by a frantic scramble by officials to construct a narrative that blames the victim for resisting their own subjugation. As reported by the BBC and Clarín, the Department of Homeland Security rushed out a statement calling Garces Perez an illegal alien and framing the shooting as a dangerous attempt to evade arrest. Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended the agency's actions with arrogant indifference. They want us to look at the badge and forget the blood on the asphalt.

Rushed out of the hospital and locked away in a cell

They took Wilber Garces Perez to a local hospital after shooting him, but they could not be bothered to finish the job of healing him. As documented by Clarín and The Texas Tribune, medical staff discharged him less than four hours after he took a bullet to the back. They left the lead embedded near his spine while he bled through his gauze. They hauled him straight to an ICE processing center in Pflugerville and dumped him into a Pearsall detention center in the early hours of Monday morning. They shackled his ankles, placed him in a waist chain, and treated him with calculated cruelty. When U.S. Representative Greg Casar visited him on Wednesday, he found a man sitting in a wheelchair with his left arm in a sling, heavy bruising across his torso, and debilitating pain on his left side. He had received his first injection of pain medication just one hour before the congressman walked in.

The bureaucrats at DHS, led by Markwayne Mullin, had the nerve to claim on social media that Wilber was receiving some of the best medical care of his life. His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, revealed that detention personnel revoked his communication privileges and banished him to an isolated room with a flat, non-adjustable bed. A medical specialist examined him on Wednesday and recommended immediate surgery to remove the bullet. The agency that put it there would rather watch him suffer in a cage than admit fault. More than 100 members of Congress have demanded his release. Yet the agency tells the world they will not slow down or leave Austin, treating an entire community as an occupied territory.

A federal judge halts the machine before it can bury the evidence

Only a federal courtroom in San Antonio and the fierce persistence of his legal team stand between Wilber Garces Perez and a fast-tracked deportation flight to Venezuela. As reported by the BBC, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia, a Clinton appointee, stepped in to temporarily block the removal order after Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch filed a federal lawsuit for a temporary restraining order. Wilber missed his original immigration court hearing only because the notice was mailed to an old address despite his compliance with change-of-address rules. It was a bureaucratic trap designed to secure a deportation order in absentia. Now, the desk's hypotheses warn us that ICE will likely try to bury its internal use-of-force investigation. They did the same after the July 7 fatal shooting of 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, where officers lacked cameras entirely and the agency closed the inquiry without a single public disciplinary action.

They expect us to accept that accountability is too complicated, that transparency is an obstacle to safety, and that a delivery driver can be shot in the back with impunity simply because his work permit expired in December. We cannot let them hide behind their excuses, their secret memos, and their taxpayer-funded contracts that pour tens of millions of dollars into IT modernization and enforcement systems while bleeding human beings dry in privatized detention cells. Justice for Wilber Rafael Garces Perez demands that federal authorities release him immediately from Pearsall. They must transport him to a proper hospital for the spinal surgery he desperately needs. They must launch an independent criminal prosecution against the officer who fired the shot. Until this country stops treating human beings as disposable collateral for political theater, the border will remain what it has always been for those who bear its weight. It is a place where the state shoots first and asks for your papers while you bleed.

ICE shot an Austin driver and left a bullet in his back

A bullet in the back and an agency with the cameras off

Rushed out of the hospital and locked away in a cell

A federal judge halts the machine before it can bury the evidence

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