There is a man sitting in an ICE detention facility in Texas right now with a bullet still lodged near his spine.
The people holding him work for the same federal agency whose officer shot him.
His name is Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. He’s 28 years old. He came to the United States from Venezuela. On Sunday afternoon, he was working for DoorDash and making a delivery in Austin when he encountered federal immigration officers.
According to Garces Perez, agents in an unmarked SUV sideswiped his car before he realized they were trying to pull him over. He says the emergency lights and sirens came on later, after the vehicles collided again. He asked if he could pull over somewhere safer than underneath a freeway.
Then, he says, an agent shot him.
The bullet entered his back and remains lodged near his spine because doctors reportedly determined that removing it would be too dangerous.
Hours later, he was transferred from the hospital into ICE custody.
DHS has acknowledged the shooting but, as of Monday, has provided little public explanation of what led an officer to fire.
That should disturb the hell out of every American.
And if you wear a badge for a living, it should make you furious.
This Is Not What Policing Is Supposed to Look Like
I spent two decades in law enforcement.
There are rules when you stop somebody. There are rules when you pursue somebody. There are rules governing when you put your hands on somebody and when you draw your weapon.
And there are especially rules governing when you pull the trigger.
Those rules exist for a reason.
Because when the government gives you a badge, a gun, and the legal authority to deprive another human being of their freedom, it is giving you an extraordinary amount of power.
That power is supposed to come with extraordinary accountability.
What we’re seeing from ICE increasingly looks like the opposite.
Let’s be clear about what ICE is.
ICE has federal law-enforcement authority. But immigration enforcement is not the same thing as ordinary street policing. Much of the immigration system is civil and administrative. It’s visas. Asylum claims. Removal proceedings. Immigration courts. Work authorization. Paperwork. Hearings.
It is a massive federal bureaucracy charged with enforcing immigration law.
It was not created so masked federal agents could cosplay as local cops, cruise American streets in unmarked vehicles, grab people, and then expect the public to simply trust them because they’re wearing tactical gear and carrying guns.
Yet that is increasingly what Americans are watching happen.
And now another man has been fucking shot.
A Badge Isn’t a Permission Slip
When I was on the job, if I discharged my weapon, I knew exactly what came next.
Investigators.
Statements.
Evidence collection.
Questions about where I was standing, where the other person was standing, what I saw, what I believed the threat was, and why I believed pulling the trigger was necessary.
That’s not harassment.
That’s not anti-cop.
That’s what makes legitimate policing possible.
Because a badge isn’t a permission slip.
Austin officials have demanded a thorough, independent investigation into this shooting. They should get one.
DHS says its investigative arm is leading the investigation with assistance from the FBI. Local authorities have also sought involvement.
Good.
Because after a federal officer shoots somebody on an American street, “we investigated ourselves” cannot be the end of the accountability process.
The public deserves the evidence.
This Stains Every Badge
This is the part that pisses me the fuck off personally.
Every time somebody acting under the authority of a badge behaves recklessly, abuses that authority, or escapes meaningful scrutiny after using force, the damage doesn’t stop with that officer.
It lands on everybody who wears one.
There are cops all over this country who go to work every day and try to do this job correctly.
They make difficult arrests without hurting people.
They de-escalate situations nobody ever hears about.
They understand something fundamental about carrying a badge:
Having authority over another person doesn’t make you more important than them.
It makes you responsible for them.
When Americans see masked federal agents conducting aggressive operations in their communities, they don’t necessarily distinguish between agencies.
They see the badge.
They see the gun.
They see the government.
And every abuse of that authority makes it harder for the next decent cop to convince somebody that the badge deserves their trust.
That’s why every person who wears one should be outraged by what we’re seeing.
This shit stains the entire profession.
Immigration Status Does Not Eliminate Due Process
DHS says Garces Perez had a final order of removal.
His attorneys tell a more complicated story.
They say he entered the United States through the CBP One process in 2024, applied for asylum, received authorization to work, and updated his address with the immigration court. According to his lawyer, notice of a subsequent hearing was sent to his previous address. He didn’t appear, and a judge ordered him removed in absentia.
Those facts will be litigated through the immigration system.
That’s what the legal system is fucking for.
Because here’s what shouldn’t be complicated:
A removal order is not a death sentence.
Being undocumented is not a death sentence.
Missing an immigration hearing is not a death sentence.
And none of those things, standing alone, justifies shooting somebody.
There may be facts about Sunday’s encounter that haven’t become public yet. If ICE possesses evidence that changes our understanding of what happened, release it.
Show us.
Because the justification for using deadly force has to stand on its own.
We Need the Evidence
There are still important facts about this shooting we don’t know.
That’s not a reason to stop asking questions.
It’s the reason we should be asking more of them.
Who initiated this encounter?
Why?
When did the agents identify themselves?
When were emergency lights activated?
What commands were given?
What did Garces Perez do?
What threat did the officer perceive?
Where was Garces Perez when the officer fired?
What specifically made that officer believe firing a gun was necessary?
Was there body-camera footage?
Was there dashboard footage?
Was there surveillance footage from nearby businesses or traffic cameras?
And after doctors decided that a bullet lodged near this man’s spine was too dangerous to remove, why was he transferred from a hospital into immigration detention?
These aren’t partisan questions.
They’re the questions you’re supposed to ask when the government shoots somebody.
ICE Is Beyond Reform
And here’s where I’m going to part ways with people who think the answer is another oversight board, another internal investigation, or another round of reforms.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
ICE can’t be saved, and it’s too fucking late to reform.
Because ICE, as it exists today, has become a cancer on the American justice system.
And I don’t use those words lightly.
I know that legitimate law enforcement sometimes requires officers to make extraordinarily difficult decisions in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances.
But legitimate law enforcement also depends on restraints.
It depends on standards.
It depends on transparency.
It depends on due process.
And most importantly, it depends on the public believing that the people enforcing the law are themselves bound by it.
Look at what we’ve allowed ourselves to normalize.
Masked federal agents.
Unmarked vehicles.
People being seized off American streets.
Families struggling to determine where their loved ones have been taken.
Questions about identification, warrants, and due process.
And now, once again, gunfire.
Then, when something goes catastrophically wrong, we’re supposed to wait for the same federal apparatus responsible for the operation to tell us whether it did anything wrong.
No.
At some point, you have to stop asking how to reform an institution and start asking whether the institution itself has become the problem.
I think we’re there.
Abolish ICE. Then Build What We Actually Need.
Let’s get one thing straight.
Abolishing ICE does not mean America suddenly stops enforcing its immigration laws.
The United States obviously needs an immigration system.
We need border enforcement. We need investigators. We need people processing visas, asylum claims, removal proceedings, trafficking cases, and the thousand other complicated responsibilities involved in administering immigration law.
But none of that requires preserving ICE in its current form.
ICE should be abolished and reconstituted from the ground up.
Take the legitimate functions we actually need and rebuild them inside an institution designed for those purposes.
Define its mission.
Define its limits.
Require its agents to identify themselves.
Establish rigorous standards governing stops, arrests, pursuits, detention, and the use of force.
Require meaningful training before somebody gets a badge and a gun.
Build in independent oversight so that when something goes wrong, the agency isn’t effectively grading its own homework.
And make one thing absolutely fucking unmistakable from the first day of training:
You are bound by the Constitution.
You are bound by due process.
You are bound by the rule of law.
You are bound by standards governing when and how the government may use force against another human being.
Those things aren’t inconveniences that get in the way of law enforcement.
They are what make law enforcement legitimate.
The Country Has a Choice to Make
We’re heading toward the 2026 midterms, and immigration enforcement is going to be one of the issues Americans hear about constantly.
Voters should know exactly where candidates stand on what comes next for ICE.
Do they believe the existing agency can be reformed?
Do they support additional oversight or changes to its enforcement practices?
Or do they believe the institution has become so compromised that it should be abolished and its legitimate functions reconstituted inside something new?
Those are materially different positions.
My own position isn’t ambiguous anymore.
I don’t want another commission.
I don’t want another promise of better training.
I don’t want somebody different sitting at the top of the same institution and telling us that this time it’ll be different.
I want ICE abolished.
I want the legitimate functions our immigration system actually requires rebuilt inside an institution designed from day one around constitutional limits, professional standards, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law.
Because when the government puts armed agents on American streets, it’s not enough for those agents to have authority.
That authority has to be legitimate.
It has to be restrained.
It has to be accountable.
And the people exercising it have to understand that the Constitution applies to them too.
We don’t yet know every fact surrounding what happened in Austin.
We should find out.
We should demand the evidence.
We should demand an independent investigation.
And if the evidence shows that an officer violated the law, that officer should be held accountable under the same laws they’re supposedly out there enforcing.
But this shooting also forces us to confront a much bigger question about the institution responsible for it.
A badge should mean something.
It should mean service.
It should mean restraint.
It should mean accountability.
It should mean that the person wearing it understands that the power entrusted to them belongs to the public.
And above everything else, it should mean that nobody — nobody — is above the law.
ICE has lost my confidence that it can live up to those principles.
It’s time to tear it the fuck down and build something that can.
