Cedar Park, Texas police arrested a 24-year-old Venezuelan illegal immigrant who had been on the Texas Department of Public Safety's 10 Most Wanted Criminal Illegal Immigrant List, one of ten fugitives wanted for offenses ranging from murder to child sexual abuse.
Officers in Cedar Park, a suburb north of Austin, received a tip on September 5 about the whereabouts of Fermin Alejandro Calles Garcia, who faced an active arrest warrant out of Travis County. They conducted a traffic stop on a vehicle he occupied, took him into custody, and handed the case off to Texas DPS Criminal Investigations Division special agents who assisted in the arrest.
The Travis County Sheriff's Office had issued the warrant in March 2025, charging Calles Garcia with Sexual Assault of a Child, Stalking, and Misdemeanor Assault Causing Bodily Injury. All three charges remain allegations; no court disposition has been reported. A $3,000 reward will go to the anonymous tipster whose call led police to the fugitive, Breitbart Texas reported.
Calles Garcia's arrest removes one name from a roster that still carries nine. The remaining fugitives on the Texas DPS 10 Most Wanted Criminal Illegal Immigrant List are wanted for alleged offenses that include murder, aggravated sexual assault of a child, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14, indecency with a child by contact, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, failure to comply with sex-offender registration requirements, and indecent exposure to a minor.
Rewards of up to $7,500 are in place for tips that lead to the arrest of any of those nine. The DPS Criminal Investigations Division issued a statement on the arrest but did not release the verbatim text through the reporting available.
Cedar Park, a city of roughly 90,000 people in Williamson County just north of Austin, is not a border town. It is the kind of mid-size Texas suburb where families move for good schools and low crime, exactly the sort of community that bears the downstream cost when immigration enforcement fails at the federal level and fugitives scatter into the interior.
The timeline raises a straightforward question. Travis County issued the warrant in March 2025. The tip that finally located Calles Garcia did not come until September 5, at least six months later. During that window, a man wanted for the alleged sexual assault of a child moved freely enough to be found riding in a car in a neighboring county.
No information has been released about the alleged victim's relationship to Calles Garcia, whether he had been arraigned or entered a plea, or how he came to be in the United States. The source identifies him as a Venezuelan national and an illegal immigrant; no legal-status documentation has been published.
What is known is that the arrest happened only because an ordinary person saw a most-wanted flyer and called it in. That citizen will collect $3,000 for doing what the system could not do on its own for half a year.
Texas built its Criminal Illegal Immigrant Most Wanted List precisely because the state decided it could not wait for federal agencies to act. The list puts names and faces in front of the public and attaches cash rewards to results. In this case, the mechanism worked. But nine names remain, and the charges next to them, murder, child sexual abuse, aggravated assault, are not abstractions. They represent real victims in real Texas communities.
When citizens have to do the finding and local police have to do the arresting, it tells you everything you need to know about who is actually enforcing immigration law in this country, and who isn't.
