(AFP) – With her cheeks painted as the flags of Guatemala and Mexico to honor her parents, 16-year-old Estella joined students protesting immigration raids Tuesday after the weekend shooting of a Venezuelan man in Austin, Texas. Born in the United States, Estella said she is making noise for her parents and other immigrants who have been silenced by fear under President Donald Trump’s harsh anti-immigration policies. “I’m here and I’m glad to be their voice,” she told AFP.
She joined about 100 high school students from the Pflugerville school district in central Texas, to protest the recent shooting of DoorDash delivery driver Wilber Garces Perez and chant slogans against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE has been using “way too much force,” Estella said, calling it “unnecessary.” “They even shot a man trying to do his job — like, deliver something. And I think it’s unfair.”
Garces Perez was shot and wounded by ICE agents on Sunday, and despite being transported to a hospital twice to care for the wound, as of Tuesday he remained jailed in a detention center with the bullet still inside his body, his lawyer said. US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, who oversee ICE, said Tuesday on X “ICE does not and would not advise” on hospital medical procedures, denying their role in his treatment. The shooting is the latest violent incident that has drawn protests against ICE, which has conducted raids around the country with masked agents and unmarked cars as part of Trump’s campaign promise to curb illegal immigration. DHS reports 51,000 undocumented people were arrested in the US in August.
The lawyer for Garces Perez, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said Tuesday that “he’s still in a lot of pain, the bullet is still lodged in his body.” “We have filed a federal lawsuit and the judge has ordered that he be present at the first hearing, which is scheduled for Wednesday, September 30th, and that means he won’t be deported,” she said. The ICE agent who shot Garces Perez was not wearing a body camera, Lincoln-Goldfinch added. Garces Perez told reporters by phone Monday that the bullet fractured his collarbone and was lodged near his spine, adding that it had not been removed despite his objections.
Federal agent violence against Latino men in the United States has alarmed many in the community. 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, Lorenzo Salgado, died in July after he was shot by an ICE officer in Houston, Texas. In an X post Tuesday, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullins pointed to graffiti near the site of Garces Perez’s shooting as evidence of “hate, violence, murder.” The video he shared showed a pillar marked with expletive-laced graffiti, along with “KILL ALL PEDOS” and “KILL DONALD TRUMP.”
At the demonstration, protesters were more concerned with actual violence than graffiti. Mexican-American Gia Acosta, a 16-year-old US citizen, came to protest along with her mother, Sarah Rosales. “I’m here because we want peace. ICE agents being in our streets and our schools, in my opinion, is really ridiculous,” Acosta said. Rosales agreed. “ICE is a Trump-backed terrorist entity that is terrorizing our communities, that’s going after our immigrant neighbors, that’s going after our citizen neighbors,” Rosales said. “It needs to stop.”
– Moisés ÁVILA
© 2024 AFP
