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# ICE Shot a DoorDash Driver in Austin, and the Official Story Lasted About a Day
- URL: https://askablackman.me/ice-shot-a-doordash-driver-in-austin-and-the-official-story-lasted-about-a-day/
- Published: 2026-09-22T15:06:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T15:06:55.000Z
- Description: DHS announced it would investigate itself and described Wilber Garces Perez as 'an illegal alien' headed for deportation. Then he got on the phone and started talking.
- Author: Free Game News
- Tags: Politics

On Sunday afternoon, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was doing something millions of Americans do to pay rent. The 28-year-old Venezuelan was out delivering a DoorDash order in North Austin when, by his account, an unmarked black SUV pulled alongside him and tried to sideswipe his car.

By Monday, the Department of Homeland Security had reduced all of this to a paragraph. DHS announced that Homeland Security Investigations, with FBI assistance, would lead the investigation into the officer-involved shooting of 'an illegal alien from Venezuela, who illegally entered our country under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal.' His condition was stable, the statement said, and he was 'in federal custody pending removal.'

That framing lasted about a day.

On Monday, Garces Perez called into a press conference organized by his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, and gave a version of events that clashes with the government's at nearly every point. He said the SUV that first tried to hit him had no lights or sirens, and he assumed it was an aggressive driver. When he realized the occupants were ICE agents, he said, he asked to pull over so they could detain him, and they refused. He made a U-turn under a highway overpass to find a safe place to stop, he said, and the agents rammed his car again and shot him in the back. 'There was no foot chase,' he told reporters, directly rebutting what his attorney says was the agency's initial description of the incident. 'I never got out of the vehicle until I had to.'

The physical evidence at the scene leans his way on at least one point. Photos and witness video show bullet holes in his blue sedan, including one in the driver's side door. In video taken minutes after the shooting, Garces Perez sits hunched in the driver's seat clutching his shoulder while masked federal agents stand nearby. 'They shot me because I didn't stop,' he tells the person filming.

Even the one-sentence character sketch in the DHS statement is contested. Lincoln-Goldfinch says her client was in the country legally with a work permit and a pending asylum application, and that he is married to a woman with legal status. DHS says he entered illegally and has a final removal order. Those claims may both turn out to be technically arguable, since asylum applicants can hold work permits while still facing removal orders, but only one version made it into the government's press release.

What happened next is where the story gets darker. Garces Perez was taken to Dell Seton Medical Center with a bullet lodged near his spine and a fractured clavicle. His attorney says hospital security initially told her and his wife that he was not there at all, then ran them off the property. Garces Perez says that when he asked a doctor whether the bullet would be removed, he was told 'they're in a hurry to get you out of here.' Around 4 a.m. Monday, ICE moved him roughly 130 miles to the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, where his attorney says he spent the night on the floor of a room without a bed and without pain medication.

Hours after describing all this to reporters, he was moved again, this time to another hospital. His attorney said he was experiencing paralysis on his left side. As of Tuesday, he was back in a hospital bed, still carrying the bullet a federal officer put in him.

Now consider who is investigating the shooting. Homeland Security Investigations is leading it. HSI is a component of ICE. The bureau examining an ICE officer's decision to shoot an unarmed delivery driver is, organizationally speaking, the shooter's employer. The FBI is assisting, which sounds reassuring until you look at how that played out in Minneapolis.

In January, an ICE officer named Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother of three, during an enforcement operation. DHS immediately claimed Good had tried to run agents over with her SUV, and administration officials called it an act of domestic terrorism. Video of the encounter contradicted those claims, showing Ross standing to the side of her moving vehicle as he fired. Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was initially supposed to jointly investigate, then the U.S. attorney's office cut state investigators out entirely, leaving the FBI as the sole investigator. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's response to the state's complaints was blunt: Minnesota, she said, has no jurisdiction.

Rep. Greg Casar, the Austin Democrat, has that history in mind. 'Over and over, ICE has shot people and then lied about what happened,' he said this week. 'We can see the lies with our own eyes.' He has demanded an independent investigation, the suspension of the officer involved, the release of unedited footage, evidence sharing with state and local law enforcement, and a congressional briefing by September 28 on whether ICE followed its own protocols.

He also flagged the most uncomfortable conflict in the whole affair. Garces Perez is the central witness to the shooting, and he is being held by the agency that shot him, pending removal from the country. 'If ICE deports him,' Casar said, 'the key witness to their shooting disappears.'

The pattern extends beyond Minneapolis and Austin. In July, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three, during a traffic stop. He was not even the target of the warrant agents were serving. The Austin shooting came less than three months after a week in which ICE fatally shot two people, according to KUT News. The first person killed by immigration agents in President Trump's second term was Ruben Ray Martinez, shot in South Padre Island, Texas, in March 2025.

There is a local wrinkle worth watching. Austin's mayor and police chief both say they want the Austin Police Department involved as a third party, and APD has promised transparency. But Texas state government has spent the past year and a half working hand in glove with ICE, and the Texas Department of Public Safety has been a close partner in the enforcement surge. When state troopers showed up in Austin on Sunday night, it was to fire pepper balls at protesters, three of whom were arrested along with damaged police vehicles and minor officer injuries. Whether Texas applies any real pressure for an outside investigation, or simply lets Washington grade its own homework, will say a lot about how much that partnership is worth to the people getting shot.

Every police department in America knows what a credible shooting investigation looks like: an outside agency, preserved evidence, released footage, a named officer, and a prosecutor with subpoena power. What DHS has built instead is a closed loop in which it shoots, announces, investigates, holds the witness, and schedules his deportation. The loop only breaks when someone outside it, a witness with a phone, a reporter, a member of Congress, gets hold of a fact the agency did not control.

In Austin, that has already started. The question is whether anyone with actual power forces it to continue.

## Free Game Takeaway

Treat the first government statement after any police or federal shooting as a claim, not a conclusion. In Minneapolis, the official account of Renee Good's death collapsed under video. In Austin, the account started wobbling within 24 hours. The concrete signals to watch now are specific: whether DHS meets Rep. Casar's September 28 deadline for a briefing on whether ICE followed its own use-of-force protocols, whether unedited footage is released, whether the officer is named and suspended, and whether Texas DPS, which partners closely with ICE, pushes for independent access to evidence or stays quiet. Watch Garces Perez's immigration case too. If the government moves to deport the central witness before any outside investigator interviews him, that tells you the investigation was never the point. And if you live in a city where ICE is surging operations, the Minneapolis lesson is that bystander video is often the only evidence the federal government cannot control, which is exactly why the protests keep forming at the scenes.