An ICE agent shot a DoorDash driver in North Austin on Sunday afternoon. He was 28, he was from Venezuela, and he was working. Protesters showed up at the intersection within hours.
What officials have confirmed
Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot in the torso just before 1 p.m. at U.S. 183 and Anderson Square. He survived. He is stable, and he is in federal custody pending removal.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis told reporters there may have been a foot chase before the shooting, and was careful to flag that as preliminary. Perez is an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela with a final order of removal.
Homeland Security Investigations is leading the investigation, with the FBI assisting.
He has now given his account
Updated Tuesday morning. Wilber Rafael Garces Perez spoke from a federal detention facility on Monday, and his version does not match the agency’s.
Through his attorney, he says he was driving a DoorDash order when an unmarked car sideswiped him. He made a U-turn under the highway. He says the car sideswiped him again, and then agents shot him.
He says the shot hit him in the back of the neck. ICE said there was a foot chase. Garces Perez and his lawyer say there was no foot chase.
He told his attorney the bullet is still in him, lodged near his spine, and that he is in a lot of pain.
His lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, is asking for the full body-camera footage.
He was moved around 4 a.m. to the Pearsall detention facility, about 130 miles from Austin, after being released from Dell Seton Medical Center.
What has not been explained
Federal authorities have not said what happened. Not why the agent fired, not what the encounter was about, not whether Perez was armed, not what the agent believed was happening.
That is the entire center of the story and it is blank.
A pattern, not an isolated case
Three days before this, an ICE officer in Minneapolis pleaded not guilty to six federal counts of making false statements about shooting a man through a front door. That case is the first and so far only Justice Department prosecution of a federal officer out of Operation Metro Surge.
Last week a federal judge blocked warrantless ICE arrests across seven Southern California counties. And a Fox News poll found 53% of voters saying enforcement has gone too far, with independents and Hispanic voters both at 60%.
None of that tells you what happened in Austin on Sunday. All of it tells you why people were standing at that intersection by evening.
The BeezLoop Take
A federal agent shot a man on a public street in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. The agency’s entire answer so far is that it will look into itself.
No account of the encounter. No timeline. Nothing about what the stop was for or whether the man was armed. When the only people who know are the people being investigated, the public gets whatever that agency decides to hand over. So far that is nothing.
We do not know if the shooting was justified, and neither does anybody else writing about it today. A foot chase is a real thing. Agents do run into danger. Austin’s own police chief called her account preliminary. Anyone who already has the headline written should slow down.
He was delivering food. Whatever his paperwork said, this started with a man working a shift on a Sunday. That is what an explanation has to account for, and there still is not one.
What to watch
Whether HSI releases any account of the encounter this week, and whether the Travis County DA opens a parallel state review. In Minneapolis, the federal charge that eventually landed was about what the officer said afterward, not the shooting itself. That distinction is worth remembering as this one develops.
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