A federal agent's bullet turned an ordinary Sunday shift into a serious injury, and within hours, into a street protest. Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan national working as a DoorDash driver, was shot in the torso by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in North Austin on 20 September 2026.
He survived and was later released into ICE custody, but questions about exactly who he is, and how he ended up at the centre of a crowd calling for ICE to leave the city, have driven the story since. The shooting remains under investigation.
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