The shooting of a man by a federal officer on Sunday in Texas ruptured an ostensibly quiet afternoon amid an immigration enforcement surge in Austin.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been very active in the Texas capital of late, although less showy than the militarized federal violence in Minneapolis this January, helping keep the operation effective but flying under the national radar. Then shots rang out.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was in the process of delivering a DoorDash food order on the city’s north side when ICE encountered him shortly before 1pm. Video posted online appears to show an ICE officer getting out of his car and shooting at Garcés Pérez’s car three times.
His car, as later visible at the scene, had a large dent on the front passenger side. Garcés Pérez, who was hit once in the back between his shoulder blades, is a Venezuelan national who has lived in the United States for two years, according to his lawyer, but had been ordered removed from the US. Garcés Pérez told onlookers who rushed to the scene that he had been shot because he hadn’t stopped.
Austin police officers who arrived could be seen in bystander footage rendering first aid to the bleeding man, while ICE officers stood back. Garcés Pérez was taken to a downtown hospital for treatment but, according to lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, was whisked away from there by ICE late Sunday afternoon.
For a few hours, his partner and the lawyer could not locate him, then on Monday morning Lincoln-Goldfinch told the Guardian he’d been located at the South Texas ICE Processing Center, located 140 miles to the south-west, in Pearsall.
“Bullet still lodged in his back. No pain meds,” Lincoln-Goldfinch said by text on Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about the circumstances leading up to the shooting, or Garcés Pérez’s whereabouts and condition.
Austin, the politically liberal capital city of conservative Texas, has repeatedly found itself at the crossfire of the immigration debate.
The state’s Republican leadership has often sought to make an example out of the city, forcing local leaders to weaken Austin’s policy of not collaborating with ICE.
For more than a year, state police have handed countless unauthorized immigrants over to ICE during traffic stops, but the city police had not joined in.
Cooperation between state or local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement is arranged under so-called 287(g) agreements, which have been proliferating in the second Trump administration, especially in states such as Texas and Florida.
But even with that, some local leaders said this summer has marked a low-profile but aggressive surge in immigration enforcement in the region, spurred by a jump in ICE acting alone rather than relying on state troopers to stop people and pass them on. Lawmakers reported ICE stopping cars in traffic or asking people about their immigration status in public sites like parking lots and gas stations.
“I think it needs to be said that as mayor of the city of Austin, I’m very angry about this,” Kirk Watson, the city’s Democratic mayor, said on Sunday during a press conference after the shooting. “A person being shot on the streets of Austin by someone purporting to be law enforcement, particularly when it’s ICE, is something that causes me to be unhappy and angry. And while I’m unhappy and I’m angry about it, I’m not surprised at all. It’s happened in other cities, with the nature of ICE and the way ICE is doing its business these days.”
In an initial statement issued shortly before midnight on Sunday night, DHS said Garcés Pérez was in stable condition and that he was “in federal custody pending removal” out of the US.
The agency also said that it was leading the investigation into the shooting, alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). However Austin leaders have called on city police and the Texas Rangers, part of the state’s Department of Public Safety, to aid with the investigation, citing public distrust in DHS. They have also demanded that the agent involved in the shooting be kept in Texas as the investigation continues.
The exact details leading up to the shooting remained unclear on Monday.
Video posted on social media shows a man running out of the black SUV and shooting at Garcés Pérez’s mostly stationary blue sedan from behind it. Three gunshots ring out. The car moves up a few feet and then stops.
Nedavia Bolaños and her husband were the first witnesses on the scene. The couple, owners of a Mexican ice cream shop just off the intersection of the shooting, ran outside after they heard the shots. For several minutes, they pestered the only ICE agent on the scene about what had happened.
The agent, masked in what appears to be a black balaclava, stood there, saying only that he wanted the couple to stay at a distance. He did not render aid, a video Bolaños provided exclusively to the Guardian shows. They acknowledge that an ambulance has been called, as the man sits in the driver’s seat, clearly in pain and clutching his chest.
That video then shows Austin police arriving at the scene minutes later. After helping federal agents handcuff Garcés Pérez and seat him on the ground, they cut off his black T-shirt to reveal a bullet wound between his shoulder blades.
About 10 minutes later, an ambulance arrived and carried Garcés Pérez away, Bolaños said.
Within an hour, more than a hundred protesters had gathered at the site. State and local police formed a barrier around the dozens of federal agents, who based themselves under the highway median. The protesters chanted expletives and waved Mexican, American and Guatemalan flags, some of which had been bought on the spot for $20 from a hawker who set up shop nearby. Several protesters could be seen washing their eyes and mouths in pain, after they were sprayed with what they said was teargas or chemical spray.
The protests grew and lasted late into the night, resulting in several arrests, according to local news reports.
The shooting comes after several months of increased immigration enforcement, particularly in the immigrant-heavy north side neighborhood where the shooting occurred, as well as several predominantly Hispanic suburbs and exurbs.
Austin city council member José “Chito” Vela, who represents the neighborhood where Garcés Pérez was shot, said that he has heard constituents describe an increase in immigration arrests since the start of the summer, an enforcement bump driven by a rise in unilateral action by ICE. While ICE was largely seen making immigration arrests after Texas Department of Public Safety traffic stops for the first year or so of the second Trump administration, they have begun to act increasingly on their own, Vela said.
City leaders had previously raised concerns over the increased action. Congressman Greg Casar, an Austin Democrat who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has sent a letter to DHS demanding cooperation in an “immediate, independent investigation” into the shooting, the full release of any footage the federal authorities have of the shooting, and “accountability for any wrongdoing by the agent responsible”.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
