An ICE officer shot a 28-year-old Venezuelan man during an enforcement operation in Austin, Texas, and the man had entered the country during the Biden administration and already had a judge's order sending him home.
The shooting happened on the afternoon of September 20 on Austin's north side, under a highway overpass, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents moved to arrest Wilber Rafael Garces Perez during what the agency called a targeted law enforcement operation. Garces Perez, who had a final order of removal issued by an immigration judge, attempted to flee, triggering a brief foot pursuit that ended when an ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officer fired several shots, DHS officials told Breitbart Texas. At least one round struck Garces Perez in the back of the neck.
He was transported to a local trauma center in serious but stable condition, treated, and later released, with the bullet still lodged near his spine. Doctors determined it was too risky to extract. ICE then transferred him to a detention facility in Pearsall, Texas, roughly 160 miles southwest of Austin, where he remains in custody.
The case sits at the intersection of two facts that do not easily resolve. DHS officials said Garces Perez was an illegal immigrant with a final order of removal, the legal endpoint that means an immigration judge reviewed his case and ordered him out of the country. That order made him a priority target for ICE enforcement.
But the Associated Press reported that Garces Perez initially entered the United States in 2024 through the CBP One program, the Biden-era app-based system that allowed migrants to schedule appointments at ports of entry, and that he held a valid work permit at the time of the shooting. His immigration attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, told the AP he was making a DoorDash delivery when ICE agents approached his vehicle.
How a man who entered through a lawful parole channel wound up with a final removal order is not explained in any available account. The gap matters. CBP One admissions were not border-jumping; they were appointments approved by the federal government under Biden administration policy. If Garces Perez entered through that program and later fell out of status, or if an immigration judge found his claim meritless, the removal order is the system working as designed. If the order was issued in error or is under appeal, the calculus changes. Neither DHS nor ICE has publicly clarified the sequence.
Lincoln-Goldfinch, the attorney, told reporters she and Garces Perez's wife had been blocked from seeing him and did not know his location after the transfer.
Bystander footage aired by Fox News showed the pursuit and shooting. The video showed an ICE officer approach a vehicle as the driver attempted to flee, followed by what appeared to be several gunshots. The passenger side of the vehicle sustained visible damage. DHS has not confirmed how many rounds the officer fired or how many struck Garces Perez.
An unnamed ICE official told reporters the agency is still deploying its newly funded body camera devices. Whether the officer involved was wearing one at the time is unclear, photos from the immediate aftermath suggest he was not, though that has not been officially confirmed.
ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division and the FBI are jointly leading the investigation into the shooting. Austin police are not running the probe, but the city's police chief weighed in publicly.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis said the city deserved transparency:
"The city of Austin deserves answers. We're going to get all those questions answered, and we'll be as transparent as we can be."
Shortly after the shooting, protesters arrived at the scene carrying pre-printed anti-ICE signs. The New York Post reported the shooting triggered angry demonstrations near the overpass. How many protesters were arrested, if any, remains unclear. Who organized the rapid response and distributed the printed signs has not been reported.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson did not hold back:
"I'm very angry about this. [But] 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 and the chaos that we see it performing and fomenting."
Watson's framing, that ICE itself is "fomenting chaos", reflects a posture common among Democratic municipal leaders who have resisted federal immigration enforcement. It does not address the fact that Garces Perez had a final removal order, meaning a federal judge had already determined he had no legal right to remain in the country. Officers enforcing that order were doing what the law requires.
From the Pearsall detention center, Garces Perez spoke to reporters in Spanish by phone. He described his condition plainly:
"I am not doing well due to the gunshot wound, and I have not received the medical attention that I require."
A bullet near the spine is not a minor wound. Whether ICE's detention medical staff can provide the level of care his injury demands is a legitimate question, one that federal courts have addressed repeatedly in cases involving detained individuals with serious medical needs. If ICE is holding a man with a bullet lodged against his spinal column and providing inadequate treatment, that is a problem regardless of his immigration status.
His attorney acknowledged his immigration status had lapsed but pushed back on the idea that it justified the shooting. "Not that being out of status would justify any of this at all," Lincoln-Goldfinch told the AP.
The Austin incident is not isolated. The New York Post noted it is part of a broader pattern of ICE-involved shootings in 2026, including two fatal shootings, one in Houston and one in Maine. Civil rights organizations and some local officials have called for independent oversight of ICE use-of-force incidents, a demand that has gained traction as enforcement operations have expanded.
ICE's expanded enforcement posture is a direct policy choice, one this publication has supported as a necessary correction after years of deliberate non-enforcement. But expanded authority demands expanded accountability. Body cameras exist precisely for moments like this. If ICE is conducting armed arrest operations in American neighborhoods and its officers are not yet equipped with functioning body cameras, the agency is operating without the basic transparency tool that every local police department in the country now takes for granted.
The FBI and HSI investigation will determine whether the officer's use of force was justified. The facts known so far, a man with a removal order who fled from agents, describe a situation where force may have been warranted. But "may have been warranted" is not the same as "was warranted," and the public has seen no body camera footage, no detailed use-of-force report, and no official account of what the officer observed that prompted him to fire at a man who, by at least one account, was delivering food.
Strip away the shooting and the protests, and the underlying failure is straightforward. The Biden administration created CBP One as a mechanism to process migrants at the border in an orderly fashion. Garces Perez used that program to enter in 2024. He received a work permit. He was, by the federal government's own determination, authorized to be here.
Then an immigration judge ordered him removed. The system that let him in decided he had to leave. He did not leave. ICE came to enforce the order. He ran. An officer fired.
Every step in that chain traces back to a border policy that processed people into the country without the institutional capacity to track them, adjudicate their cases promptly, or ensure compliance with removal orders. The Biden administration admitted hundreds of thousands of people through parole programs and app-based scheduling. When those cases resolved against the applicants, enforcement fell to ICE officers making armed approaches on city streets, exactly the kind of confrontation that a functioning immigration system is supposed to prevent.
Enforcing removal orders is not optional. It is what the law demands. But the conditions that put an ICE agent and a DoorDash driver on a collision course under an Austin overpass were years in the making, and the people who built those conditions are nowhere near the scene.
