AUSTIN — Wilber Rafael Garces Perez had spent most of Sunday making DoorDash deliveries. By early afternoon, he was on his way to another pickup when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent pulled him over near US-183 and Anderson Square in North Austin, a stretch of commercial blocks not far from where he worked.
He did not make it home. Just before 1 p.m. on September 20, Garces Perez, 28, was shot in the upper torso by an ICE agent after a foot pursuit that lasted only seconds. He was taken to Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas Austin in serious but stable condition. By evening, he had been transferred into ICE custody and moved to the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, roughly 80 miles south of San Antonio.
His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, confirmed his identity and said Garces Perez entered the United States through a Biden-era humanitarian parole program. He carries a valid work permit. He also holds a final deportation order, the kind of overlapping legal status that places tens of thousands of migrants in an enforcement gap the Trump administration has moved aggressively to exploit, in some cases at gunpoint.
The details of what led to the shooting are not fully established. Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis called the available information preliminary Monday, declining to specify what Garces Perez did or said in the moments before he ran. ICE said an agent ran a license plate check, matched the vehicle, and attempted a stop, and that Garces Perez drove off before the encounter moved to the sidewalk and the agent fired. No weapon was found at the scene.
Approximately 100 protesters gathered at the intersection by Sunday evening, chanting outside the police tape. Austin Mayor Kirk Watson called the shooting deeply troubling and demanded that no single agency investigate itself. Watson told reporters Monday there had to be answers. His office did not say whether the city had been notified about the ICE operation beforehand.
The letter cited the existence of footage from multiple angles and called for evidence preservation. Casar warned that the administration’s record of declaring enforcement shootings justified before independent reviews are complete had eliminated any credible presumption of accountability. DHS did not respond to requests for comment by Monday afternoon. A joint investigation was opened by Austin Police, the Texas Rangers, and Homeland Security Investigations.
The Austin shooting is the third ICE-involved shooting in Texas since Trump’s second term began, and among many more nationally. In July, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 25, during a traffic enforcement operation in Houston. In March 2025, an agent shot American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez at a motel in South Padre Island. NBC News has documented at least 22 people shot at by federal immigration officers during Trump’s second term, a pace the outlet described as without precedent in the agency’s history.
“This is a pattern,” Ramon Palomares, the national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said Sunday. “It is a disturbing pattern, and it has got to stop.” LULAC is already in federal court challenging the deployment of armed ICE agents near polling locations ahead of November’s midterms. A lawsuit filed September 10 after DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said agents could enter election sites to serve warrants invokes an 1874 statute barring armed federal forces from polling locations. Palomares said the organization was reviewing the Austin case for additional action.
The legal framework around immigration enforcement has been under sustained judicial pressure for months. Nine federal appellate courts in a row have blocked Trump’s policy of indefinite immigration detention without bond hearings, with one court comparing the practice to Japanese American internment. A DHS watchdog report published last week found migrants held in 18-square-foot metal cages at a Florida detention facility the administration had publicly promoted, discovering violations of federal standards on medical care, food, hygiene, and recreation.
Lincoln-Goldfinch said Monday she planned to file an emergency motion to block her client’s deportation while the shooting investigation remained open. Garces Perez’s work permit was valid at the time of the encounter. She described the stop not as a routine immigration check but as a targeted enforcement operation against a man the agency had already flagged for removal, whatever his current legal standing.
Whether anyone will be held accountable depends partly on evidence that has not yet surfaced. Austin police said Monday they could not confirm whether body cameras were active during the operation. ICE does not issue body cameras to agents conducting immigration enforcement, a policy the agency has maintained even as its officers have shot more than 20 people in less than two years. The Texas Rangers, whose involvement suggests the case may be treated as a criminal inquiry, have not indicated a timeline for their findings.
