On Sunday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and wounded a Venezuelan man in Austin, Texas. Of course it’s fine because it was someone who was no doubt the worst of the worst and was doing the very worstest crime at that moment, which the Trump administration has assured us are the only people ICE is going after.
Yeah, right.
What really happened is that ICE shot a 28-year-old man, Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, who was busy making a DoorDash delivery. Also, per his lawyer, Pérez has a valid work permit and entered the U.S. lawfully as an asylum seeker. This is yet another instance of ICE thugs hurting immigrants who are just going through their quotidian days, trying to go to work, trying to get home, trying to live.
While Pérez was making his delivery, an ICE vehicle without any emergency lights activated pulled up next to his car and tried to hit him. Pérez kept driving, because who wouldn’t do the same if a random car decided to smash into theirs?
Only after sideswiping him did ICE hit the lights, and then, as Pérez was looking for a safe place to pull over, the ICE vehicle hit him again, then an ICE agent got out and shot Pérez through the car door.
The speed with which ICE goons basically decided that they could murder someone for the crime of being Venezuelan and near them in a car echoes what happened in Maine in July, when an ICE agent shot and killed a 25-year-old Colombian immigrant, alleging he was somehow trying to flee a scene and that the act of doing so warranted shooting him.
It echoes what happened in Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, where ICE thug Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan immigrant through the door of his home for the crime of running away from him. That’s the case where Castro and ICE and the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office then decided to charge the immigrant Castro shot, of course, because Castro spun a tale of how he was brutally attacked. That tale fell apart once video surfaced, and Castro now faces state and federal criminal charges.
Even the agency’s post-shooting tactics are the same. After an ICE agent murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July, ICE made sure he was admitted to the hospital as a John Doe, stripping him of all identification and belongings to make sure his family couldn’t even find him to claim his body.
Related | ‘Gestapo tactics’: ICE is killing innocent people—and trying to cover it up
In this instance, Pérez was taken to the hospital but then transferred to an unknown ICE location where his lawyer and family couldn’t find him. On Monday, his attorney said they had finally learned Pérez was in a detention camp in Pearsall, Texas, over two hours away, and he still has a bullet lodged in his body.
Another depressing similarity? The Department of Homeland Security said it is leading the investigation into Pérez’s shooting, along with the FBI. We know from what happened in Minnesota that such an “investigation” is no investigation at all, and comes with the added bonus of stonewalling actual investigations by local law enforcement.
We may no longer be in the high-profile violent heyday of January 2026, but ICE continues to wreak deadly havoc on immigrants and blue cities, simply because it can.
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