Venezuelan man imprisoned after ICE shooting, bullet still inside him

Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan national, was jailed with a bullet still lodged in his body after a U.S. immigration agent shot and wounded him in Texas, his lawyer said Monday. Garces Perez told reporters he was delivering a DoorDash order Sunday when an ICE agent rammed his vehicle before shooting him.

"I'm in a lot of pain because the shot fractured my clavicle and at the hospital where they took me they couldn't remove the bullet because it's close to the spinal cord...I'm not doing very well, I still have the bullet inside," he told reporters by phone.

Hours later, his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said in a post on X that Garces Perez had been "moved to another hospital as he is now experiencing left side paralysis." The Sunday shooting in Austin, Texas, marked the latest incident of violence involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents tasked with enforcing President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.

Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE division, is leading the probe into the shooting with the assistance of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security said. Garces Perez had "illegally entered our country under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal," DHS said on X.

But his lawyer insists he was in the U.S. "legally with a work permit." Lincoln-Goldfinch told reporters at a press conference that he had earlier been moved from a hospital to a detention center in Pearsall, some 135 miles (215 kilometers) southwest of Austin.

"He was shot here in his back, and they didn't take the bullet out, and they didn't give him pain medication, and they transferred him to ICE, to a processing center where he spent the night without a bed," Lincoln-Goldfinch said.

Around 100 demonstrators gathered outside the Texas Capitol on Monday night to protest ICE's actions. "We are less safe when they're around," Rosalie Kendall, 40, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). "They're kidnapping our neighbors. They're disappearing people who are part of our community."

Nearly 51,000 undocumented migrants were arrested nationwide in August, according to DHS figures. Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, was shot by ICE in March 2025, what the Texas Tribune described as the first known killing of an American by immigration agents during Trump's second term.

More recently, Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado died in July after an ICE officer shot him in Houston, Texas. Two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were fatally shot by federal immigration agents in separate incidents in Minnesota during a crackdown on undocumented migrants in the northern state earlier this year.