Venezuelan migrant shot by ICE in Austin cites lack of medical care: ‘How are they going to leave the bullet in me?’
Following protests and pressure from Texas lawmakers over his health, the wounded man was readmitted to hospital
Wilber Garcés Pérez has endured more than 24 hours of pain. The bullet that an immigration agent fired at him on a street in Austin, Texas, on Sunday at midday still remains in his back. The hospital where he was treated did not remove it. And at the Pearsall detention center, where he was taken, he was given a painkiller in the early hours of the morning. He recounted this in a phone call on Monday during a press conference.
“I’m in bad shape, the bullet is still there. I haven’t received the medical help I need,” he said on the phone, his voice amplified by reporters’ microphones. “I’m in a lot of pain because the shot fractured my collarbone and at the hospital they wouldn’t remove the bullet because it was close to hitting my spine.”
Garcés, a 28-year-old Venezuelan, was driving his blue Toyota Corolla to deliver an order for the DoorDash app on Sunday. Suddenly, a pickup truck that up to that moment had not identified itself as belonging to officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intercepted him on an avenue. It had not turned on any lights. Further ahead, the vehicle abruptly cut him off. Garcés thought they were going to crash. “That’s when the officer got out, told me he was an immigration agent and asked me for my documents,” he recounted.
The Venezuelan did not intend to flee. The officer asked him to get out of the vehicle and he only asked to be allowed to park his car in a lot instead of leaving it blocking the avenue. “He told me, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’m not going to leave it here,’” he said. When the Venezuelan turned to park, the chase began, and the agents rammed car into car. Then the shot was fired.
Garcés felt the bullet in his back. He said the immigration officer, instead of helping him, forced his way into the vehicle, turned off the ignition “and left me inside. He didn’t help me,” he recounted. “I was telling him I was in terrible pain, that I couldn’t move. I was practically unconscious.” An ambulance arrived afterward.
“They wanted to discharge me quickly from the hospital”
When Garcés arrived at the hospital, he thought he would undergo surgery to remove the bullet from his back. Medical staff told him they would run all the tests. But the mood changed suddenly: “A doctor came in and told me they wouldn’t perform surgery because they were in a hurry to discharge me so they could take me — to bring me here.” The migrant said, incredulously. “How are they going to leave the bullet in there?”
EL PAÍS asked Dell Seton Medical Center, where he was taken, about the treatment Garcés received, his condition at the time of discharge, and the facility’s haste to send him away. There has been no response. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that, by the time he was transferred to the ICE center in Pearsall, he was stable.
Meanwhile, Garcés’s wife, Elizdar, tried to obtain information about his health from outside the hospital. His lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, denounced that they received no information and that they were even expelled from the property. At 4.30 p.m. a hospital lawyer told them that the Venezuelan had been transferred by ICE to a detention center.
With that news, Elizdar did not sleep Sunday night into Monday. Until then she did not know how her husband was. On Monday, Lincoln-Goldfinch was told he had been taken to a facility two hours away.
At the ICE detention center, Garcés continued to complain of pain. He said he was given an ibuprofen in the early hours and later taken to the infirmary, where there were no beds available.
In absentia deportation order
ICE, the most visible arm of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant machinery, said in a statement sent to EL PAÍS that the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are leading the probe into “the agent involved in a shooting against an undocumented migrant from Venezuela.”
Román Palomares, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), on Monday demanded that Congress create an independent body outside DHS to investigate every incident in which ICE uses excessive force. “A badge is not a shield,” he said. “DHS and ICE have lost the trust of Americans.”
Garcés’s story brought to the press conference the names of more people who have been wounded or killed by the violent tactics of immigration agents in different cities across the country. Such as Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two Americans who died after being shot by immigration agents in January in Minneapolis. Or Colombian Johan Durán, also shot dead by officers in July in Biddeford, Maine. And later, Mexican Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who died after being shot in the torso, although he was not the target of a July 7 pursuit by agents in Houston.
A federal agency spokesman justified the operation by alleging that Garcés had entered the United States irregularly during Joe Biden’s administration and that he had a final deportation order. Lincoln-Goldfinch contradicted the official version, specifying on Monday that Garcés had been admitted to the country in 2024 under the CBP One program — which authorized the legal entry of thousands of migrants through appointments — and that he had applied for asylum.
The lawyer explained that Garcés had informed the immigration court of his change of address, but that one of the hearing notices was sent to his old home: “He didn’t know he had a hearing, he didn’t attend and they ordered his deportation in absentia, something which is very common because the court makes a lot of mistakes with these notices.”
Austin Congressman Greg Casar demanded that ICE not deport Garcés, arguing that by doing so they would be removing the only witness to what happened on Sunday. On Monday night, Austin held its second night of protests, this time at several points across the city. At the corner where Garcés was detained, the smell of tear gas still lingers. A crowd was decorating the spot as a memorial “so it won’t be forgotten that something happened here,” Vladimir Herrera, one of the organizers, told El PAÍS.
The lawyer, like the other speakers at the press conference — from activists to members of Congress — condemned the violence of the operation. “There is no justification for having shot him in the back.”
Garcés’s call with the media ended unexpectedly.
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