Get ICE Off Our Streets

I suppose we should all be eternally grateful to La Migra (currently also known as “Immigration and Customs Enforcement”), and its masters in the Trump Regime – for having saved Austin from an obviously dangerous DoorDash driver. By now most Austinites will have been familiar with the thrilling story of a vehicle pursuit on the north side, two unmarked black SUVs running down the sedan driven by Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, and then one agent heroically shooting the unarmed man in the back, while they had him pinned in his car. Shades of Popeye Doyle: The streets of Austin have never been so safe!

It remains difficult to know precisely what happened on Sept. 20 near the intersection of North Lamar and Anderson Lane, because the video evidence is fragmentary, Garces Perez initially gave a misleading account, and the ICE bounty-hunters involved have resorted to their now standard practice of lying about everything. Most recently, in addition to charging Garces Perez with fleeing and resisting arrest, they’ve added obstruction and assault charges – the latter because they claim one of the officers was struck by the mirror on Garces Perez’s car. Not quite as bad as being shot in the back (and then having the injury ignored for nearly two weeks), but hey, a “federal officer” (i.e., a hired gunslinger) might have gotten hit by a mirror, and who knows what sort of permanent trauma that might induce?

There will be quite a lot of “he said”/“he said” in the air over the ongoing Garces Perez story. While it remains necessary, especially for his legal team, to pursue all the exact details of his particular case, equally important is to step back from this notorious incident and consider a much broader question: Why have federal ICE vigilantes been deputized to roam our streets, all over Austin and the country, playing at being bounty hunters, chasing down our neighbors, incarcerating them in for-profit prisons without even the appearance of due process – and occasionally shooting one or another at random? 

Had Garces Perez not been run down and shot – as recorded partly on a bystander’s phone – he would have been quickly disappeared into one of ICE’s Texas cages, fed into Stephen Miller’s massive deportation machine, while his family and attorneys tried desperately to find him. Perhaps the notoriety of Garces Perez’s case will now offer a temporary modicum of legal protection to him, and in the immediate aftermath it’s been reported that ICE administration has ordered no more vehicle chases without specific training, and that (once again) all officers are required to activate working body cameras during arrests. To the extent those changes are enforced at all, they are clearly window-dressing – the feds hope to avoid another high-profile incident before the midterm elections. Whatever the short-term outcome, rest assured that after Nov. 3, it will be Wild ICE West once again.

The transparent Trumpist fiction of targeting “the worst of the worst” was abandoned long ago, along with the ancillary deception that ICE is protecting us from criminals. ICE is a blatant, tyrannical exercise in reinforcing outright white supremacy across the country, a form of racial terror officially sanctioned and more systematic than the repeated waves of racist violence that have periodically disfigured U.S. history since the Civil War. Our brown or immigrant neighbors are being terrorized by a cowboy gestapo given license to round up non-white people on the streets, at their workplaces, outside schools, and at their homes. And the racist campaign only makes an occasional headline when one or two of these runaway goons gets overenthusiastic and shoots somebody.

Because why else give them guns?

Even in this particular case, the agents – according to their own courtroom testimony – had already identified Garces Perez from his license plate and could have arrested him on foot in a restaurant parking lot – but they claimed there were “too many people” around. Much more likely, they wanted to play cowboys-and-Indians on Austin streets. They preferred a vehicle stop, which quickly went sideways. It ended in a chase, their James-Bondish pinning of Garces Perez’s vehicle, and three shots fired through the back window of Garces Perez’s car – because all big-time car chases have to end in gunfire, right? I suppose the unarmed victim should be thankful ICE agents are such poor shots – even if he had to wait 11 days for them to bother removing the bullet from his back. 

Whatever the final outcome of the vigilante capture of Garces Perez, to a degree it has already accomplished its larger purpose: one more episode in the federal terror campaign against all immigrants, whatever their actual legal status. Donald Trump’s official thugs, led by Miller, intend to expel directly as many of our non-white neighbors as possible, and to terrorize many more into abandoning their American lives by “self-deporting.” 

In November, the voters need to strike back, and begin the arduous process of putting an end to these criminal outrages. It’s long past time to abolish ICE, and to expel its federal perpetrators from public office and public life.

From 2005-2020, now-retired Austin Chronicle News Editor Michael King wrote about city and state politics from a progressive perspective in his weekly column, “Point Austin.” We’re pleased to bring back his column whenever he’s inspired to tackle the state we’re in.

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