(AFP) – A Venezuelan national shot and wounded by a US immigration agent in Texas was jailed with the bullet still inside his body, his lawyer said Monday. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, is in stable condition after suffering a gunshot wound to his torso, according to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The shooting in Austin, Texas, on Sunday marked the latest instance of violence by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents tasked with enforcing President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Garces Perez’s attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, told a press conference that her client was transferred from a hospital to a detention center in Pearsall, some 135 miles (215 kilometers) southwest of Austin. “He was shot here in his back, and they didn’t take the bullet out, and they didn’t give him pain medication, and they transferred him to ICE, to a processing center where he spent the night without a bed,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said. She said Garces Perez was making a DoorDash delivery when an unmarked black truck sideswiped him. “He didn’t know it was ICE and he did a U-turn,” she said. “The truck chased him, and sideswiped him again, and the agents came out and shot him in the back of the neck and pulled him out of the car.”
“There is absolutely zero justification for having shot him,” she said. “This is why we’re calling for a stop to ICE traffic stops. ICE officers are overarmed, overpaid, undertrained, and violent.” DHS said on X that Garces Perez had “illegally entered our country under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal.” But Lincoln-Goldfinch maintained he was in the US “legally with a work permit.” A makeshift shrine with flowers, candles, and a sign reading “Justice 4 Wilber” was placed near the site where the shooting occurred.
Trump campaigned for president on a promise to expel millions of undocumented migrants, and has taken a series of dramatic actions since returning to the White House. Nearly 51,000 undocumented migrants were arrested in the United States in August, according to DHS figures. Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, was shot by ICE in March 2025, in what the Texas Tribune said was the first known killing by immigration agents of an American in Trump’s second term. More recently, a Mexican man named Lorenzo Salgado died in July after he was shot by an ICE officer in Houston, Texas. Two Americans — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were shot and killed by federal immigration agents in separate incidents in Minnesota during a crackdown on undocumented migrants in the northern state earlier this year.
© 2024 AFP
