Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and wounded 28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez in Austin, Texas, on Sunday after they said he ran from a traffic stop while making a DoorDash delivery. Federal authorities are now investigating the shooting, and the Austin Police Department said it hasn’t been allowed to see the case.
The incident sparked a protest that local authorities dispersed with pepper balls and tear gas after declaring it an unlawful assembly Sunday night.
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It’s the latest in a growing pattern of shootings by federal immigration agents since President Donald Trump’s second-term crackdown began — one that’s now stretched from Austin to Chicago to Minneapolis.
Shootings coast to coast
Since the beginning of 2025, federal immigration agents have killed at least seven people during immigration-related arrests or protests surrounding their enforcement, according to a Straight Arrow analysis of data from the Gun Violence Data Hub. At least a dozen have been injured in shootings.
The first shooting occurred on March 15, 2025, when agents killed Ruben Ray Martinez during a traffic incident in South Padre Island, Texas. ICE’s role in the shooting wasn’t confirmed until nearly a year later, when media outlets looked through Department of Homeland Security files.
Scrutiny of federal agents reached a new high this year after they killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, less than a month from each other. The killings sparked major protests and prompted questions from Congress over what federal immigration agents were doing in their immigration crackdown operation. But months later, those questions remain largely unanswered.
Accountability in DHS
In January, ICE agent Christian Castro shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis during an incident in Minneapolis and then claimed Sosa-Celis attacked him with a broom and shovel. The story held up long enough for prosecutors to charge Sosa-Celis and another man, but surveillance footage later proved it false. Minnesota state prosecutors charged Castro with assault and falsely reporting a crime.
That wasn’t the only time video evidence disputed a federal immigration agent’s official report on a shooting.
In a Chicago suburb, an ICE agent shot and killed Silverio Villegas González during a September 2025 traffic stop. DHS claimed González had dragged and seriously injured the agent with his car, but video analysis of the incident later contradicted those claims. In body cam video, the agent can be heard saying his injuries were “nothing major,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
In both cases, and in Good’s fatal shooting, federal prosecutors declined to bring charges over the shooting itself. Castro was indicted in September. But he was only charged for lying about what happened after the assistant U.S. attorney on his case objected to his supervisors’ decision not to pursue civil rights charges and was fired.
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division made the same call in Good’s killing, declining to investigate it at all, a decision that led at least four top officials in the division to resign. The DOJ then pushed Minnesota prosecutors to instead investigate Good’s widow’s alleged ties to activist groups, prompting six more resignations, including the office’s second in command.
In González’s case, prosecutors also declined to charge the agent, but even that news only surfaced when DHS confirmed it a year later. The DHS hasn’t released the agent’s name.
How the investigative process works
In most shootings involving federal agents, there is a process that takes place. ICE and Customs and Border Protection have their own Office of Professional Responsibility. Both offices are legally required to report every firearm discharge that causes death or injury to the DHS’s Office of Inspector General.
But in Good’s case, that process was cut short. FBI agents and Minnesota investigators had begun a joint probe and obtained a warrant to collect evidence from her vehicle. FBI Director Kash Patel and senior DOJ officials shut the investigation down, according to The New York Times, barring Minnesota from pursuing its own.
DHS said Monday that it’s leading the Austin investigation into its own officer, according to The Guardian. It’s unclear if the agent was wearing a body camera. Austin’s mayor has called for an independent probe, the same request that stalled in Minneapolis and Chicago.