Wilber Rafael Garces Perez’s wife told him to stay home on Sunday and spend time with her. But he wanted to work and earn some money as a DoorDash food delivery driver. So he left.
At 12:30 p.m. the 28-year-old immigrant from Venezuela called his wife, “shouting that he had been shot and he was in pain, and then the call cut off,” his immigration lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said Monday at a news conference a day after the shooting in North Austin.
Garces Perez, who called into the news conference, said an unmarked SUV sideswiped him twice before he realized that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were trying to pull him over. He said he did a U-turn under a freeway underpass when the SUV struck his blue Toyota Camry. That’s when the SUVs turned on their blue-and-red lights and sirens, he said.
He asked the agents if he could stop somewhere safer than in traffic under the freeway. He said an agent told him no, then he felt one shot to his back.
He was transported to Dell Seton Medical Center, where staff told him they weren’t going to remove the bullet because it was too close to his spine, Garces Perez said in the call from the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, about a two hour drive south of Austin.
He said that at 4 a.m. he was transferred to a temporary processing center, where he slept on the concrete floor of a cell.
“I’m not doing very well,” he said. “I have not received the medical attention that I require.”
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said that one of his staff members went to get some forms at the detention center and saw Garces Perez, who said that he started to lose feeling on the left side of his body and was going to be taken to a hospital. Lincoln-Goldfinch said on social media on Monday evening that she received a call from another detainee to tell her that detention officers “handled Wilber roughly.”
“I was told that he was handcuffed, shackled at the feet, placed in a waist chain, and taken to a hospital,” she posted on social media. “I am waiting to find out how he is doing and what his current condition is.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Garces Perez’s account of what happened prior to the shooting and his complaint about inadequate medical care.
It’s the third time ICE officers have shot a person in Texas since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. The other two shootings — of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July and Ruben Ray Martinez in March 2025 in South Padre Island — were fatal.
The Trump administration has prioritized immigration enforcement, vowing to conduct the largest deportation in the country’s history. Under his administration, ICE has increased street arrests, looking for immigrants — even those who entered the country legally — to detain and deport.
“We are fed up with ICE and DHS telling us lies about what has happened in these incidents where people are being murdered and shot,” said Lincoln-Goldfinch, an Austin-based immigration attorney.
In previous ICE shootings, DHS has released preliminary information that was later contradicted by video footage or witness statements. For example, In Salgado Araujo’s case, DHS initially said that he tried to ram ICE vehicles. But the other three men in the van later said Salgado Araujo never tried to hit the officers after and instead, ICE vehicles struck them from behind and the side before one of the agents fired, striking Salgado Araujo in the stomach.
After immigration agents in January fatally shot 37-year-old Renée Good and 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis during separate protests against immigration enforcement operations, DHS claimed Good tried to run over ICE agents and that Pretti had tried to harm immigration agents. But video footage called those accounts into question.
The New York Times reported that ICE agents were in the North Austin area running background checks on motorists’ license plates when they found Garces Perez, who had a deportation order on file. DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal government data as of early August, ICE’s San Antonio area of responsibility, which includes Austin, has seen one of the largest shifts toward street arrests — ranking third among the nation’s 25 areas of responsibility.
Garces Perez entered the U.S. two years ago using the CBP One cellphone application, which the Biden administration set up to allow some immigrants make appointments with immigration agents at a port of entry, his lawyer said. After being processed by immigration officials, he was allowed to enter the U.S. and then applied for asylum, Lincoln-Goldfinch said. He later received a work permit.
After settling in Austin, he updated his home address with the immigration court, his lawyer said. But the court sent a notice of his court hearing to a previous address, so Garces Perez didn’t know he had missed a court appearance, Lincoln-Goldfinch said. As a result, the immigration judge issued a deportation order, which he was not notified about, Lincoln-Goldfinch said.
“I’ve been an immigration lawyer for 20 years, doing removal defense cases, like thousands of cases in the immigration court system. This is a very common outcome that the immigration court does not properly update people’s addresses,” she said. “The person doesn’t arrive, and they order them deported in absentia. I would say, maybe daily in my law practice, we see this happen.”
There were nearly 90,300 removal orders in absentia for asylum applicants as of the third quarter of fiscal year 2026, continuing the sharp rise that started since Trump’s return to office, according to federal data. Along with common reasons such as notices being sent to the wrong address, ICE also started arresting people at immigration courts last year, creating a chilling effect that has led some immigrants to skip their hearings out of fear of being detained.
During the Biden administration, hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived at the border, many of them Venezuelans seeking political asylum. In the two years that CBP One was in use, 936,500 people made appointments and legally crossed the border, with the top nationalities being Venezuelan, Cuban and Mexican.
But on Trump’s first day back in the White House, he ended the use of CBP One, revoked the parole status of everyone who entered using the application and canceled all scheduled appointments.
Advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration over the moves, arguing that the White House didn’t properly cancel the programs and that the Biden administration had the legal right to parole immigrants into the country under immigration law. The lawsuits are pending.
Kristin Etter, another Austin immigration attorney representing Garces Perez, filed a request for his release and to block his deportation in a federal court in San Antonio on Monday.
Etter wrote in the court documents that her client is not disputing the final removal order but wants a chance to apply for a U-visa, a type of immigration status for victims and witnesses of a crime. Etter also wrote that because the shooting is now being investigated as a potential crime, he has the right to apply for a U visa.
“The current administration has demonstrated a pattern of accelerating immigration enforcement against individuals connected to incidents involving federal immigration officers, raising a substantial and immediate concern that (the federal government) will attempt to remove (Garces Perez) before he has an opportunity to pursue U nonimmigrant status,” Etter wrote.
DHS did not immediately respond to a comment request about Garces Perez’s petition to be released and his intent to seek a visa.
On Monday night, a crowd of protesters at the Texas Capitol grew to more than 100 people after 8 p.m. About 25 Austin police officers, including some on bikes, kept watch over the demonstration.
People holding signs that said “protect our neighbors, abolish ICE” could be heard chanting “money for education not deportation,” “ICE out of Austin,” “se ve , se siente, el pueblo está presente” and “boots, boots, boots on the ground, we’re here we’re here to shut this down.”
The protest disbanded peacefully at about 9 p.m.
Laura Duclos contributed to this story.
