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An ICE agent shot and wounded 28-year-old DoorDash driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez in North Austin on Sept. 20, during what his attorney describes as a vehicle pursuit — not the routine traffic stop some early reports suggested.
- The agency reviewing the shooting, Homeland Security Investigations, is ICE's own enforcement arm rather than an outside watchdog, a distinction driving calls from Austin's mayor, the Travis County DA and members of Congress for a truly independent inquiry.
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Street arrests by ICE in Houston have climbed more than fourfold over the past year, and Austin shop owners near the shooting site report sales down by as much as 60% as fear spreads through Central Texas's Latino community.
A Delivery Run Interrupted by Gunfire
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan national, was out delivering meals for DoorDash on the afternoon of Sept. 20 when his route took him through the Anderson Square shopping area on North Austin's Research Boulevard, a stretch of road that doubles as U.S. Highway 183. What happened next left him with a bullet lodged near his spine and Austin's Hispanic community rattled for days afterward.
Garcés Pérez managed to reach his wife by phone in the middle of the encounter, shouting that he'd been shot before the call cut out, according to an account his immigration attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, gave reporters the following day. He was treated at a local hospital and, by Monday night, transferred to the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, more than 100 miles from where he was shot.
Dueling Accounts of How the Chase Began
Exactly how the confrontation started is contested. Austin's police chief initially told reporters there may have been a foot chase before the shooting; Garcés Pérez's legal team flatly rejects that version. "There was no foot chase," his attorney told ABC News, adding that surveillance footage backs up her client's account. Garcés Pérez has said through his lawyer that an unmarked SUV forced him off the road, that he asked to pull over once he realized federal agents were involved, and that the vehicle struck his car before an agent opened fire — a sequence Texas' Department of Public Safety has separately described as assistance with an ICE "vehicle pursuit," not a routine stop.
DHS has offered a different frame entirely, describing Garcés Pérez publicly as someone who entered the country illegally and was subject to a final removal order. His attorney counters that he crossed legally in 2024 through the Biden-era CBP One appointment system, held a valid work permit, and missed an immigration hearing only because the notice went to an old address — the technicality, she says, that produced the removal order DHS has since cited.
Who's Actually Investigating — And Why That Matters
DHS says the shooting is being handled by Homeland Security Investigations, with the FBI assisting. That detail is easy to misread: HSI isn't an independent body sitting outside ICE — it's one of the agency's own investigative branches, effectively leaving ICE to examine its own conduct. That's precisely why Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, the Travis County District Attorney's office and eight city council members have all pushed for a separate, outside review, and why the national Latino civil rights group LULAC used the case to demand that Congress build permanent, independent oversight of ICE.
"You Can't Even Call the Police"
Reporters from Houston Public Media's KUT News spent Monday talking with residents near the shooting site, agreeing to use only first names given fears of retaliation. A business owner named Carlos said he'd spoken with both the ICE agent and Garcés Pérez in the moments after the shooting. A few doors down, a restaurant worker named María said her business has lost roughly 60% of its sales and that a Venezuelan friend of hers has already left the country rather than risk a similar encounter. "I think most people are thinking seriously about leaving," she said. She added that calling the police no longer feels safe, since any interaction with law enforcement now carries the risk of drawing federal attention.
Houston's Numbers Tell a Parallel Story
Austin's shooting didn't happen in a vacuum. A Texas Tribune analysis of federal enforcement data found that ICE arrests made outside detention facilities — on the street, at homes and workplaces — jumped in Houston from an average of roughly 150 a month under the Biden administration to more than 640 a month during the current administration's first 13 months. Those arrests now make up close to a third of everything ICE does in the city, up from about one in six before, and the same shift has played out statewide, where the community-arrest share climbed from roughly 14% to 36%. By February, Houston alone accounted for an estimated 1,660 of the nearly 7,100 arrests ICE logged across Texas that month.
Local oversight hasn't kept pace with that growth. A city-required quarterly report found Houston police had coordinated with ICE at least 103 times between April and June, months after the City Council loosened its own cooperation limits under pressure from Gov. Greg Abbott, whose office threatened to strip the city of public-safety funding that's been reported at both $110 million and $114 million in different accounts of the same standoff.
A Second Shooting Still Awaiting a Grand Jury
Houston's Latino community was already on edge before Austin's shooting. In July, an ICE agent fatally shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who had lived in the U.S. for decades, as he ferried coworkers to a job site in Houston's Magnolia Park area. Agents later acknowledged he wasn't their intended target. A Harris County grand jury has since begun hearing witness testimony in the case, though no decision on charges had been reached as of this week.
Delivery and rideshare drivers in both cities say they've become easy targets simply because they spend so much time alone in their cars. Near the Austin shooting scene, restaurant worker Juan Perez told Click2Houston/KPRC2 he's watched agents haul off construction workers and solo drivers with growing frequency over the past month, describing the pattern as constant rather than occasional.
Officials Demand Answers, State Leaders Stay Quiet
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, who represents part of Austin, has pointed to ICE's disputed account of a fatal shooting in Minneapolis earlier this year as one more reason to question the agency's version of Sunday's events. "This is a pattern — it's a disturbing pattern — and it's got to stop," he told reporters, according to CNN. Casar has also formally requested body-camera footage and a congressional briefing by Sept. 28, per Time. State Rep. James Talarico, who is separately running for U.S. Senate against Attorney General Ken Paxton, has called for an outside investigation as well, according to The Texan. As of this week, neither Gov. Abbott nor Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had commented publicly on the case, even as Abbott's own state troopers assisted ICE with the vehicle pursuit that preceded it.
Two Cities, One Anxious Wait
For now, families in Austin and Houston are adjusting in small, quiet ways — quicker errands, faster school drop-offs, closer attention to who's picking up the kids. Investigators in Austin and a grand jury in Houston are still working through what happened in each case, but for many Latino residents, the two incidents already read as chapters of the same story.
