Neha Madhira Prism
Federal prosecutors in Texas charged a Venezuelan national and father living in Austin on Tuesday with assaulting, resisting, and impeding a federal officer, after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sideswiped his car and shot him in the back Sept. 20 without warning as he was turning around to park.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, entered the U.S. in 2024 with a valid work permit to seek asylum and provide for his son in Venezuela, who has mobility disabilities that require expensive physical therapy, through a program begun under former President Joe Biden. However, President Donald Trump ended the program on his first day in office. According to Garcés Pérez’s lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, a judge issued a deportation order after he missed an immigration court hearing because the notice was sent to a former address.
At his detention hearing on the criminal charges on Sept. 30, a judge ruled that Garcés Pérez will remain detained because he is a “flight risk” and that the government has probable cause to continue the criminal case.
Garcés Pérez was delivering for DoorDash in North Austin last week when ICE agents ran his license plate and began to follow him. He then called his wife at around 12:30 p.m. to let her know he had been shot. Community member Toast Lopez, who was walking home on the same route, told Prism that he heard gunshots and ran over to see if anyone needed assistance.
“That was when I saw them pulling [Garcés Pérez] out of the car as soon as I got over here, and when I crossed the street to help, that’s when an [ICE] agent pointed the gun at me,” Lopez said.
“Next thing I knew, the whole community had pulled up, and we were all yelling and screaming, protesting almost immediately because, you know, this is our place. These are our people.”
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Garcés Pérez was taken in an ambulance to the Dell Seton Medical Center—where his wife and Lincoln-Goldfinch were not allowed to see him—before being taken back into ICE custody. Court filings from Lincoln-Goldfinch’s team state that he was forced to sleep on a cement floor at an ICE temporary processing center that night and then was transported to the South Texas ICE Processing Facility in Pearsall at 4 a.m. on Sept. 28.
After calling into a news conference from a facility-provided tablet to say that he had not received any medication and was “losing feeling on the left side of his body,” Garcés Pérez was transported to a second hospital that night. However, Lincoln-Goldfinch said on X that after Garcés Pérez spoke in the conference, guards at the detention center “forcibly took the tablet from his hands, revoked his communication privileges, and moved him out of the infirmary into an isolated room with a flat bed that cannot be adjusted like a medical bed.” The bullet remains in his spine.
Demonstrations continue in Austin since the initial protest erupted at the site of the shooting against ICE, the Austin Police Department (APD), and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) on Sept. 20, where at least six were arrested. An Austin City Council candidate was arrested after the protests on Sept. 26 while walking his dog and charged with “rioting”; DPS cited that he was identified through “a variety of records,” including social media posts, phone, and government records.
Organizers say they want Garcés Pérez to be released and receive appropriate medical care.
Texas has been steadily increasing immigration enforcement since 2021, after Gov. Greg Abbott began Operation Lone Star, an initiative that has spent more than $11 billion on border enforcement and walls. Two years later, Texas passed one of the U.S.’s most aggressive immigration enforcement laws, allowing police to arrest and deport undocumented people who crossed the Texas-Mexico border.
After the Trump administration began cracking down on immigration and sharply increased ICE raids nationwide, average daily arrests in Texas have more than doubled from 85 under Biden to 176 under Trump.
Vladimir Herrera, a member of Dare To Struggle Austin, a grassroots advocacy organization against police brutality and immigration enforcement, said he noticed more community members in Austin get detained by ICE this past February and March, with the presence of federal agents being at its largest around July.
“For months we’ve been set up at a pulga [flea market] at North Lamar and [West] Rundberg,” Herrera said. “When we first went, there were 30-plus vendors setting up in this space behind some businesses. This neighborhood was known to us as a hotbed for ICE activity, so we started going there to talk to people about the crisis.”
Emilio Verdooren, another Dare To Struggle organizer, said that masked plainclothes agents sit in unmarked cars at the local shopping plaza, banks, and parking lots within the North Austin neighborhood, surveilling community members and waiting to “pull people over, dragnet style.”
“We would see DPS stalking, be waiting behind bushes, in parking lots, waiting for people to pass by, and within five to 10 minutes of having stopped someone, ICE would show up and pick them up,” Verdooren said. “We’ve seen them pick someone up and leave their car doors open with keys inside the ignition.”
DPS did not immediately respond to Prism’s request for comment.
Other Austin nonprofits and immigrant rights coalitions, such as the Austin Sanctuary Network and La Frontera Unida, have also continued organizing community discussions and small demonstrations, as well as providing resources to impacted community members.
Garcés Pérez was brought to the Austin federal courthouse Wednesday in a wheelchair for his criminal hearing, where body camera footage was reviewed. In the video, an officer calls for DPS dispatch and shuts off his body camera before calling the other ICE agent, who investigators say shot Garcés Pérez. The agents were referred to by the initials “L.G.” and “D.F.”
“I don’t want to see him disappear into the system like I’ve seen many others,” Lopez said, adding that he does not know the whereabouts of his cousin who was taken by ICE. “That’s one of the reasons why I’ve been at [the site of the shooting] every day, making sure no one forgets Wilber’s name.”
Lincoln-Goldfinch maintains that Garcés Pérez’s criminal charge “is not an isolated case,” and “is often used against protesters and resisters against the government.”
“ We know that ICE has a pattern of trafficking people across this country and trafficking them outside of this country,” Herrera said. “More people should be thinking about what we’re seeing now as the beginning and not some climax.”
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Neha Madhira is an award-winning gender, health and politics reporter with a focus in South Asia and the Middle East. Previously, she was a breaking news reporter in Austin, Texas.
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