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# ICE Shot Him in the Back. Nine Days Later, He Became the Defendant.
- URL: https://askablackman.me/ice-shot-him-in-the-back-nine-days-later-he-became-the-defendant/
- Published: 2026-09-30T16:37:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-30T16:37:57.000Z
- Description: Federal prosecutors have charged Wilber Garces Perez, the DoorDash driver an ICE agent shot in Austin, with assaulting a federal officer. The case now hinges on a side-view mirror, an officer's word, and the camera that was not there.
- Author: Free Game News
- Tags: Politics, Culture

On September 20, an ICE agent in Austin fired his pistol through the back window of a blue Toyota Corolla and put a bullet in Wilber Rafael Garces Perez's back. On September 29, the Justice Department announced that Garces Perez is the criminal in the story.

The 28-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker, who was out making a DoorDash delivery when immigration agents stopped him, now faces one count of assaulting, resisting and impeding a federal officer, a charge that carries up to 20 years in prison. He appeared in federal court in Austin on Tuesday, nine days after the shooting, with the bullet still lodged in his body. His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said he was light-headed, nauseated and in such poor condition he seemed confused about where he was.

The sequence deserves attention, because the sequence is the argument.

According to a nine-page affidavit from a Department of Homeland Security agent, officers spotted Garces Perez's car parked outside a restaurant, ran a database check, and found it registered to someone with a final order of removal. They pulled him over. The interaction began calmly. Court documents describe the initial exchange, conducted partly in Spanish, as conversational and, in the government's own words, "pleasant and not aggressive." Garces Perez handed over his Texas driver's license through a cracked window. He asked if he could park somewhere else so his wife could retrieve the car, since he knew he would be detained. Then, about a minute later, he closed the window and drove off. As he pulled away, the affidavit says, his driver's side mirror struck one officer in the torso. A chase followed through commercial and residential streets. An officer identified only by his initials said Garces Perez tried to hit him with the car, and fired into the back window.

Garces Perez's account diverges at the crucial points. He told investigators an unmarked SUV struck his car after the pursuit and spun it around, and that he was then shot through the back-right window. In other words, he says he was shot in the back after his car had already been forced to a stop. The government says he was a threat in motion.

Fairness requires noting what his account does not dispute. According to the affidavit, Garces Perez admitted he ignored commands to exit and drove away. His attorney's earlier public description, that he did not know the unmarked vehicle belonged to ICE and was sideswiped twice before agents got out shooting, sits awkwardly next to his own statement that he fled because he knew detention was coming. Both sides in this case have told versions of events that serve them.

But here is the asymmetry that matters. One side's version will be tested in court with the power of federal prosecution behind it. The other side's version belongs to a man with a bullet near his spine who, his lawyer says, spent nine days begging for surgery.

The physical evidence is remarkably thin. The officer who fired was not wearing a body camera, even though ICE has said its field officers nationwide would have the devices by the end of September. The second officer had one but reached the scene only after the shooting. The complaint does not say whether the agent allegedly struck by the mirror was injured at all. What prosecutors have offered instead of video are three screenshots from the second officer's camera, showing the officer near the mirror with his hands on the car. Lincoln-Goldfinch is demanding the full footage, calling the stills potentially misleading and accusing the government of "playing games with my client's life and safety."

Those screenshots cut both ways, and defense lawyers will notice. They appear to show an officer who placed himself against a stopped car with a driver behind the wheel. When a vehicle then moves, contact with a mirror is close to inevitable. Whether a jury sees an assault or an officer's own positioning will be the trial, if there is one.

There is a track record here, and it is not flattering to the government. According to the Associated Press, a woman shot several times by Border Patrol officers in Chicago and a man shot in the leg by an ICE agent in Minneapolis were both charged with assaulting officers. In both cases, the charges were dropped. The Minneapolis officer has since been charged with lying about being assaulted before he fired. In a handful of vehicle-shooting cases, AP reports, claims that drivers weaponized their cars were undermined or walked back once body camera footage came out. Immigration officers have been involved in at least 10 fatal shootings since January 2025, during an enforcement surge that pushed ICE past 50,000 arrests a month for the first time.

Charging the person who was shot does several useful things for the government, and none of them require assuming a conspiracy to see the incentives. Legally, an assault on a federal officer is precisely the fact that justifies deadly force after the fact. Institutionally, the charge shifts the venue: a shooting that was under scrutiny from Austin's Democratic mayor, street protesters, the Travis County district attorney and more than 100 members of Congress is now a federal criminal case where the government picks the battlefield. Strategically, it neutralizes a witness. District Attorney Jose Garza had written to DHS and ICE calling Garces Perez a material witness whose testimony local investigators would need. A federal defendant's testimony works differently. His words now belong, first, to the case against him.

The timing also did quiet work on the immigration case. A federal judge had temporarily blocked Garces Perez's deportation and ordered him produced for a hearing. Criminal custody rearranges all of that. He spent Tuesday in U.S. Marshals custody after being pulled from a South Texas detention center, and his attorney called the charge and hearing "a surprise." A detention hearing is set for October 2.

None of this means the mirror never touched the officer, or that driving away from federal agents is wise or legal. It may well be that Garces Perez made a frightened, bad decision at that window and committed a crime in the process. What the evidence so far does not establish is the part that matters most: that he tried to hit anyone with his car, the act the government says caused an agent to fire into his back. On that question, the case currently rests on the word of an officer who wore no camera, against the word of the man he shot.

Watch what happens when the full footage comes out, if it comes out. The recent history of these cases suggests the government prefers screenshots for a reason.

## Free Game Takeaway

Watch three specific signals in the coming weeks. First, the October 2 detention hearing and whether a judge finds the mirror-strike theory strong enough to keep Garces Perez jailed; a skeptical ruling would tell you the affidavit is thinner than the press release. Second, whether DHS releases the full body camera video rather than selected stills, because in the Chicago and Minneapolis cases, full footage is what collapsed the government's version. Third, the perjury prosecution of the Minneapolis ICE officer, which is now the working template for what accountability looks like when an agent's account falls apart. For immigrants and gig workers, the practical lessons are colder: Garces Perez had a work permit and a pending asylum claim, and a deportation order existed anyway because a hearing notice went to an old address. If you or your family are in immigration proceedings, a current address on file with the court is not paperwork, it is protection. And if unmarked vehicles attempt a stop, what happened in Austin shows how fast a traffic encounter can become a shooting, then a prosecution, with no camera rolling.