Twenty-two people shot, nineteen of them inside cars

A case-by-case review of shootings by federal immigration officers since January 2025 shows where the pattern repeats: traffic stops account for nineteen of the twenty-two people shot and four of the six deaths. In Austin, the man wounded on Sunday is already in federal custody pending deportation, and the investigation into the shooting sits with the agency that fired.

Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan, was delivering food for DoorDash in north Austin when an agent of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot him inside his car early on Sunday afternoon. He was taken to a hospital in serious but stable condition and, the same day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said he is under a final order of removal and in federal custody pending deportation. The investigation into the shooting went to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the department’s own investigative arm, with support from the FBI.

The isolated episode carries three elements that, seen as a series, stop looking like coincidence: where the shots were fired, the account the agency puts forward, and who investigates.

Where the pattern repeats

A States Newsroom review published on 20 July, cross-checking news reports and documents, counted 22 people shot by federal immigration officers since Donald Trump took office in January 2025. Nineteen of those episodes, nearly all of them, involved DHS officers shooting at people inside vehicles during traffic stops. Six people died, three of them US citizens, and four of the deaths happened during those stops. The 22nd was Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian with work authorization, killed in Biddeford, Maine, on 13 July.

In the hours after such episodes, DHS accused the people who had been shot of using their vehicles as weapons. Independent video contradicted that account in several cases, and in at least five the government itself dropped the charges it had brought against the people its agents wounded.

The traffic-stop pattern has numbers of its own. In a review of 1,200 immigration enforcement incidents across eight states, the American Civil Liberties Union counted 76 people pulled out of cars, 47 windows smashed and 14 episodes in which law enforcement vehicles were rammed into civilians’ cars.

The rule that lasted a day

After the Maine death, the second immigrant shot during a traffic stop in a week, ICE directed its agents to suspend most of those stops. The guidance lasted a day: Trump ordered the practice to continue, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that agents keep conducting vehicle stops “in order to continue their deportation campaign”.

What replaced the rule was the spoken word. According to Representative Seth Magaziner, who took part in a closed ICE briefing on 22 July, the current instruction is to conduct stops only when there is no alternative, with lights and sirens on, and it has never been written down. The agents involved in July’s two fatal shootings were not wearing body cameras, and DHS blamed the absence on “back-to-back Democrat shutdowns”.

The last public DHS report on use of force covers fiscal year 2023. The numbers for 2025 and 2026 exist because newsrooms and civil rights organisations started counting case by case.

Who investigates what

The United States has no independent body charged with investigating shootings by federal immigration officers. By default, the lead is the DHS inspector general, who belongs to the same department. In July, the FBI stopped investigating confrontations and assaults against ICE agents. The Justice Department’s civil rights division declined to open a criminal inquiry into the Minneapolis and Maine deaths. Bennie Thompson, the representative who left July’s briefing with more questions than answers, summed up the problem: officials told him the case sometimes sits with the FBI, sometimes with HSI, sometimes with another entity.

Local authorities were left outside. In Minnesota, the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was blocked from crime scenes by federal agents, and the Hennepin County attorney obtained evidence only after months of litigation. In Maine, the state attorney general took over the state criminal inquiry, which runs in parallel with the DHS review. In Texas, the Harris County district attorney opened an investigation of his own and warns that access to the evidence rests with the federal government.

The tally

ICE’s internal oversight, reported to Congress in July, records 56 excessive-force complaints since January 2025: 32 cleared, one referred for discipline and no punishment handed down. In February, then-acting director Todd Lyons had spoken of 37 open investigations.

By DHS’s own count, ICE recorded 78 use-of-force incidents in fiscal year 2023, the last public figure in the series: two resulted in death, nine in serious injury and 19 in minor injury. The unit is the incident, and the Congressional Research Service notes that the agency sometimes records several uses of force as a single entry, which lowers the total. There is no official number of ICE shootings per year — not for 2024, not for 2025, not for 2026.

The most complete series available was obtained by a journalist who spent two years litigating against the agency: 59 shootings by ICE agents between 2015 and 2021, 23 people killed, at least 24 wounded and no agent ever charged. Since then a single federal charge has appeared against an agent, and it is not for the shooting. Christian Castro, the ICE officer who wounded Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg in Minneapolis in January, was charged with lying to federal investigators, after the government dropped the charges it had brought against the man he shot. He pleaded not guilty, and the Texas governor refused to sign Minnesota’s extradition request straight away.

Jonathan Ross, the agent who killed Renee Good in Minneapolis on 7 January, spent three days on leave, was quietly reassigned to another state and returned to work in administrative duties, uncharged, according to a PunchUp investigation republished by HuffPost in April. The FBI inquiry has stalled, and ICE’s internal review has been unable to begin, the same report says. In the year’s other grave cases, from Biddeford to Houston, no consequence had been concluded by September.

What Austin leaves behind

A man who earned his living delivering food was shot inside his car, in a city that does not run the investigation into what happened to him, and the removal machinery the government describes as its policy already held him in custody before the inquiry began. That is the design the 2025 and 2026 series finds in every case: the people change, the states change, and the party that decides who investigates stays the same.