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A Venezuelan national was shot and wounded by a US immigration agent, Texas officials said on Sunday, as they voiced outrage and demanded a thorough investigation.
Tasked with enforcing Trump’s immigration crackdown, heavily armed and often masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have faced nationwide backlash for aggressive and often violent tactics, including the shooting of American citizens.
The man, identified by his lawyer as 28-year-old Venezuelan national Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, was taken to a hospital in Texas’s capital city Austin in a serious but stable condition after being shot in the torso, officials said.
The wounded man’s lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said on X that Garces Perez had been shot by an ICE agent while making “a DoorDash delivery.”
The shooting took place during a “significant increase, almost overnight” of ICE operations in the Texas capital, Mayor Kirk Watson told a press conference.
The Department of Homeland Security said Monday it was leading an investigation into the officer involved in the shooting with the help of the FBI.
The department said in a post on X that the man had “illegally entered our country under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal.”
“The illegal alien’s condition is stable, and he is in federal custody pending removal,” it added.
Watson said he was “very angry and extremely disappointed that a person was shot on the streets of Austin by ICE.”
He said local law enforcement should be involved in the investigation.
“The credibility of ICE doing some form of investigation just by itself and excluding others would not be appropriate,” he said.
Texas Democratic Representative Greg Casar echoed that sentiment, telling reporters that “ICE has not been truthful in shootings in other cities.”
Casar cited the January shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis in which video footage belied ICE accounts that she had attempted to run over a federal agent.
“It is awful that this horror has come to our doorstep,” he said. “A few weeks ago as we saw the ICE surge come…I and others said that ICE needed to leave before someone was shot.”
The House Democrat called for the release of body camera footage of Sunday’s incident.
Deportation threat
A few hours later, Casar said Garces Perez had been “taken out of the hospital and into ICE custody.”
“If ICE deports him, the key witness to their shooting disappears,” the lawmaker added. “He must not be removed from this country and he must receive proper medical care.”
Lincoln-Goldfinch said her client was placed “into custody, but we still don’t know his location.”
The shooting sparked outrage in the community with video footage posted by local news outlets to social media showing several dozen people protesting at the alleged shooting site.
Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2016 and again in 2024, on a promise to expel millions of undocumented migrants, and has taken a series of dramatic actions since returning to the White House aimed at speeding up deportations and reducing border crossings.
Nearly 51,000 undocumented migrants were arrested in the United States in August, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.
Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old was shot by ICE in March 2025, in what the Texas Tribune said was the first known killing by immigration agents of an American in Trump’s second term.
Additional sources • AP, AFP