The Justice Department has charged Wilber Rafael Garces Perez with assaulting and resisting a federal officer, nine days after an ICE officer shot him in the back in North Austin. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.
The criminal complaint, brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas, says Garces Perez showed officers his Texas driver's licence at a traffic stop, then drove off, and that his side mirror hit an officer on the hip as he left. ICE gave chase. By the complaint's own account, an ICE SUV crashed into his car and spun it round. The officer then says Garces Perez tried to hit him with the car, and fired.
The assault in the complaint happens in two places, minutes apart. The side mirror is at the first stop, on an open road, caught on an off-duty Austin police officer's dash camera. The officer's claim that Garces Perez tried to run him down is at the second, under a bridge, after ICE had crashed into his car. That is where the ICE agent shot him.
When the shooting happened nobody was driving at anyone. We went through footage of the incident after it occurred, breaking it down frame by frame, a breakdown that has been made available to the legal team representing the victim. When the first shot is fired, both vehicles are stationary, the agent is clearly behind the hood of the victim's car, the shooter is even protected by his own vehicle. The version of events given are not only implausible, they are impossible.
Frames 1 to 3: The door opens
01 Door closed · 02 Door cracks open · 03 Door fully open
Frames 4 to 10: The agent walks round the SUV
04 Foot · 05 Foot; wheel rim exposed · 06 Wheel rim partly blocked · 07 Foot · 08 Foot · 09 Foot · 10 Foot
Frames 11 to 13: He reaches the gap
11 Head · 12 Head and shoulder · 13 Head and shoulder
Frames 14 to 16: The shots
14 Agent; shooting starts about here · 15 Agent · 16 Agent, still shooting
Frames 17 to 18: He stays by the car
17 Agent at the car · 18 Agent at the car
Frame 19: Just after
Frames from a bystander video (DivineDesignCo on Facebook, via Noteworthy News), cropped and annotated by researchers at the ICE List. The labels burned into each frame are theirs. The 19 frames cover about five seconds. Timings are approximate: the frames come from a compressed re-upload, so the gaps between them, and the exact moment the shooting starts, may not be entirely accurate.
Body camera footage released by Austin police, via KSAT 12.
The assault charge rests on the word of the officer who pulled the trigger. He was not wearing a body camera. The only other officer at the scene told investigators he lost sight of Garces Perez and the officer who shot him. Days earlier, ICE had announced it now had enough body cameras for every officer in the field. The officer who fired in Austin was a new recruit, brought in under the mass hirings by the Trump regime.
Garces Perez is 28 and from Venezuela. He entered the United States legally in 2024 through the CBP One app and applied for asylum, his lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, says. When he was stopped on 20 September, she says, he was picking up a DoorDash order. About four hours after he was shot, he was discharged from hospital into ICE custody with the bullet still lodged in his back. He is being held in Pearsall concentration camp and, Representative Greg Casar says, needs surgery to remove the bullet. A federal judge has blocked his deportation for now.
Pointing the blame at the person an officer has shot is becoming a pattern. In Houston, ICE detained all three witnesses to the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, while court records raised questions about ICE's own account of that shooting. In Austin, the only civilian who can contradict the officer is now the defendant.
By our count, at least 88 people have died in ICE or Border Patrol custody or during an enforcement operation since January 2025. Garces Perez survived. He is the one being prosecuted.
