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A federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent reportedly shot and wounded a man in Austin, Texas, early Sunday afternoon during the latest instance of government violence allegedly tied to President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign.
The unidentified victim was hit once in the torso and rushed to a local trauma center, where he was in serious but stable condition, Austin-Travis County EMS Chief Robert Luckritz said during a news conference. He couldn’t confirm whether the man was shot in the front of his body or from behind.
Officials said city police officers weren’t present during the shooting, which took place near a highway overpass in the 800 block of Anderson Square around 12:55 p.m. local time.
Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis said she was told the shooter “is an ICE agent,” and Mayor Kirk Watson said he was “very angry” over the shooting.
“Part of what makes me angry about this, part of what makes me so unhappy about it, is that we live in a time where there's a politics of fear, where people are trying to create fear,” Watson said.
A car at the scene of the shooting in Austin, Texas, appears to have bullet holes in it (Reuters)Watson said there was “no reason for us to be surprised” by the shooting, given “the nature of ICE and how it’s doing its business” in other cities. He called for an independent, third-party investigation, saying it “would not be appropriate” to let ICE conduct the probe.
Davis said, “I trust the Texas Rangers, and I trust [the Texas Department of Public Safety]...to work alongside us and to get — to get answers. Absolutely.”
Spokespersons for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately return inquiries from The Independent.
Photographs taken at the scene show a dark blue Toyota Corolla with damage along its passenger side and what appear to be two bullet holes in the rear window.
The police chief said she couldn’t confirm a report that the car was sideswiped and that the ICE agent fired multiple shots through its rear windshield.
“That's not what I'm hearing. I'm hearing that it was out on foot...there was a small foot pursuit,” she said, adding that “this is all very preliminary” and that she hadn’t been briefed by federal officials.
Austin Mayor Kirk Watson says there’s ‘no reason for us to be surprised’ by the shooting, given ‘the nature of ICE and how it’s doing its business’ (The City of Austin, Texas/ATXN)Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, whose district covers the shooting scene, said, “I think the obvious should be said, that there is a reason that people in Austin and across the country are deeply suspicious of anything that ICE has said.”
“People in the community don't know all the facts, but people are hurting and upset because they see how ICE has shot and, in some cases, even killed people with impunity in other parts of the country,” he said.
Casar also called on ICE to end what he called its “surge of officers here” and to instead “be focused on transparently working on issues of crime, not what they've been doing consistently here in Austin before this event.”
The mayor said local officials “have seen an increase, we believe, in the number of incidents where ICE has detained somebody, stopped somebody, those sorts of instances.”
“And it happened in a relatively brief period of time,” Watson said. “I think in one week we saw it go from: count them on one hand to in the thirties, and that happened in less than a couple of days.”
US Rep. Greg Casar says ‘there is a reason that people in Austin and across the country are deeply suspicious of anything that ICE has said’ (The City of Austin, Texas/ATXN)The incident in Austin follows a string of immigration-related shootings by federal law-enforcement officers carrying out Trump’s pledge to conduct the “largest mass deportation program in history,” which has a reported goal of expelling 1 million people a year.
In Minneapolis, two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were fatally shot while separately protesting ICE operations in January, leading to the ouster of then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who falsely accused them of domestic terrorism.
ICE officers also allegedly killed Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Colombian national Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, during separate traffic stops in July, even though neither was the target of an investigation.
Their slayings led Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to order a temporary halt to vehicle stops by ICE. Trump immediately criticized the directive, leading Mullin to countermand it the following day.
Reports also revealed that the ICE officer who allegedly shot Durán Guerrero, David Brouilette, had a history of mental illness that led military recruiters to reject him before he went off his medications and was able to enlist in the Maine National Guard and later join the Army in January 2010.
Brouilette was deployed to Afghanistan from May 2012 to February 2015, with an immediate relative telling The Associated Press that the tour of duty "destroyed him."
"They took someone who was extremely mentally ill and turned him into a killing machine," the relative said.