ICE Shot a DoorDash Driver in the Back in Austin
Rather than getting him medical help, they carted him off to an ICE detention complex—and the bullet is still in his back.
ONCE AGAIN, AN IMMIGRANT HAS BEEN SHOT BY ICE in Texas—this time he survived. But the circumstances again point to out-of-control, trigger-happy agents shooting to kill, just six weeks before Election Day.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was making a DoorDash delivery Sunday afternoon when he was set upon by ICE agents in unmarked cars. He video-called his mother, Flor Pérez, in Venezuela so she could see what was happening to him.
“Mom, ICE is chasing me!” he screamed. “They shot me, Mom!”
“He was screaming loudly, that it hurt that they had shot him in the back, he wasn’t sure if it was in the arm, he wasn’t sure where he had been shot,” Perez said in a Spanish-language interview with journalist Carlos Moreno.
A witness who was able to speak to Wilber told journalist Emiliano Tahui Gómez that ICE agents did not render aid, in contravention of their affirmative duty to request or render medical aid following the use of force. Eventually, an Austin police officer ripped open Wilber’s shirt, where the witness saw a deep hole where he had been shot between the shoulder blades. An NBC News reporter posted a graphic photo capturing Wilber’s injury.
In the interview, Wilber’s mother said her son told her that agents had crashed into his car and that he then ended the call so he could contact his wife. Wilber’s mother hoped he could call 911 to tend to him, but when she tried to call him again, he didn’t answer. His phone had already been confiscated.
The New York Times reported Monday afternoon that the agents encountered Wilber by chance, and that he was not the target of a federal investigation.
Bystander footage of the shooting and its aftermath brought back vivid and unsettling memories of the July ICE shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. In one video from Austin, a woman filming in her car stops when she hears sirens, screeching tires, and a car crash. She begins to zoom in on the scene, where a scrambling ICE agent immediately shoots at the back right door of the car what sounds like four times in quick succession. Wilber’s car appears stationary, then when he is shot at it begins to lurch forward, recalling a similar scene when Durán was fatally shot in Maine.
A second video taken in the aftermath and from a much closer angle shows two bullet holes in the back right window of Wilber’s blue sedan, while he clutches near his shoulder.
Wilber’s lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch has posted insistently since yesterday, detailing her mounting frustration at ICE’s apparent stonewalling of her and Wilber’s wife. After the shooting, the pair visited hospitals, but were unable to determine his whereabouts as of early Monday morning. Wilber’s wife slept with her phone underneath her pillow, hoping for an update on his status. Lincoln-Goldfinch’s team told me she was finally able to speak to Wilber early Monday afternoon. He told her he is in South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas—135 miles from Austin. Wilber said the bullet had not yet been removed from his back.
“We have confirmation due to communication between Kate and Wilber that he’s in Pearsall for interrogation and still has the bullet lodged in his body. He’s received no pain medication and had to sleep on the floor,” her team told me.
They also said Wilber has a son with a disability. “The boy is here in Venezuela and needs his father. The boy undergoes tests and therapies, which generate expenses, and it is his father who covers those costs.”
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Wilber told Lincoln-Goldfinch that he entered the country legally through a probation program seeking asylum. That contradicts a statement tweeted out by the Department of Homeland Security, which called him an “illegal alien” who entered under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal. “The illegal alien’s condition is stable, and he is in federal custody pending removal,” the DHS statement said.
The official DHS account added that DHS’s investigative division, with help from the FBI, would investigate the shooting. (This amounts to DHS investigating itself—where have we heard that before?)
Asked by Moreno whether Wilber had a criminal record, his mother said, “My son is a good kid, studious. He went to high school in Venezuela and studied finance at the university.”
Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running for governor of Texas against incumbent Republican Greg Abbott, demanded that the ICE agent who shot Wilber be kept in Texas in an effort to prevent ICE moving the agent beyond the reach of state authorities. (After a previous non-fatal ICE shooting in Minnesota, state leadership sought to extradite an ICE agent, Christian Castro, living in Texas; Minnesota sued Abbott before dropping the suit when the state arrested Castro last week in Minneapolis.)
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions. I will be strong on this issue when we have more information . . . but if everything is on the up and up, there is no reason for this agent to be taken out of Texas,” she told me.
WHILE DEMOCRATS AND AUSTIN OFFICIALS are waiting for more information, Hinojosa echoed the thoughts of many in response to the shooting of a DoorDash driver.
“There is no trust of ICE. Too often they do not have the training or credentialing we would want, and the information circulating that has come out is alarming. It sounds really bad,” she said. “Right now it is fitting the pattern that we have seen with these other ICE shootings. They are reckless and people aren’t safe when we have these very aggressive kinds of illegal tactics by ICE.”
Carlos Eduardo Espina, the massively popular Texas-based influencer who has backed Democratic candidates like Hinojosa and Senate candidate James Talarico told me it is “heartbreaking” that ICE shootings like this have become a common enough occurrence for people to have become desensitized to them.
He said that six weeks before the midterm elections, Americans have a choice to make.
“It is impossible to separate this from the electoral implications. It’s very obvious when these things happen they make people angry, and when you’re trying to hold onto power, making them angry before elections is not a good strategy,” he said. “These are the kinds of cases that move people that don’t pay attention to politics but [who] are against shooting Uber drivers and DoorDash drivers just because they’re working.”
In the fucking back. What a shameful country we’re becoming.
“Becoming”??
Man, we already are, and I am so ashamed!!