A federal judge has temporarily blocked the deportation of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man shot by an ICE officer in Austin, Texas, over the weekend. His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, confirmed the ruling and said her office has filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf. Perez must remain in the United States at least until a September 30 hearing.
The bullet that struck Perez in the back of the neck is still lodged in his body. He is, according to his attorney, still in significant pain and continues to require medical care. “We will continue fighting to protect his rights,” Lincoln-Goldfinch wrote on Facebook.
The shooting happened while Perez was working a DoorDash delivery. According to his attorney, an ICE truck pursued him, sideswiped his vehicle, and agents then shot him in the back of the neck before pulling him from the car. ICE has confirmed Perez held a final order of removal, but Lincoln-Goldfinch disputes the legitimacy of that order, saying the notice for his immigration hearing was sent to an old address even though her client had updated his address with the court.
That procedural detail matters enormously. If accurate, it means Perez received a removal order for missing a hearing he was never properly notified about — a due process failure with life-altering consequences. The federal lawsuit filed on his behalf centers on exactly this kind of legal vulnerability.
The political response has been swift and bipartisan in its breadth, if not its framing. Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza wrote to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and ICE Director David Venturella, asking that Perez be allowed to remain in the country while the shooting is investigated. Representative Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas, joined more than 100 congressional colleagues in a separate letter demanding Perez’s release from ICE detention so he can receive adequate medical treatment.
Those lawmakers also called on state authorities to preserve all evidence from the incident, warning that “given ICE’s history of obscuring the facts in similar investigations,” Perez must not be removed. That concern is not abstract — it echoes a recent federal case in Minneapolis, where a DOJ investigation found an ICE officer had lied to investigators following a separate shooting of a Venezuelan man.
The officer who shot Perez was not wearing a body camera at the time, multiple federal law enforcement sources confirmed. ICE is supposed to have every officer equipped with cameras by the end of this month. The absence of footage in a shooting of this nature is a serious accountability gap, and it follows a pattern: ICE agents involved in a fatal Houston shooting were also not wearing body cameras.
The officer is described as a new ICE recruit who nonetheless brings years of prior law enforcement experience, including time with U.S. Border Patrol. He completed the agency’s 256-hour Deportation Officer Training Program in August 2025, scored 99.2 percent on his pistol qualification, and received instruction on use-of-force protocols, less-lethal tactics, and warrantless arrest authority. His training record, in other words, was strong — which makes the circumstances of the shooting all the more important to scrutinize through a full, independent investigation.
The federal judiciary’s intervention here represents exactly the kind of institutional check that due process demands. Deporting a shooting victim before an investigation concludes — a man whose removal order may itself rest on a procedural error — would deny him any meaningful access to justice. The court’s temporary block preserves that access, at least for now, while the legal process catches up to the facts on the ground.