Texas Monthly reports:

The Crestview-Wooten neighborhood, where on Sunday an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot 28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, wears its identity proudly. There’s a Mexican market on one block, a supermercado on the next, and paleterias, a panaderia, and Latino-owned salons and body shops nearby. It sits just south of Rundberg and the trend-resistant “Taco Mile,” named for its concentration of authentic taco joints. North Austin neighborhoods have been seeing increased ICE activity for months. Locals have reported high-speed chases, and in August, Congressman Greg Casar chastised the department for staking out schools and churches in the area.

North Austin has been under what observers call a shadow surge, and on September 20, it burst into view when an ICE agent shot Garcés Pérez while he was out on a DoorDash delivery, according to his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch. The agent in a black Expedition collided with the Venezuelan’s Toyota Corolla and then fired into the vehicle, striking Garcés Pérez in the upper left shoulder. Witnesses say he was taken conscious from the scene.

The incident is the latest in a series of shootings by ICE agents as President Donald Trump and his advisers continue to pressure ICE to hit three thousand arrests per day. While Operation Midway Blitz, in Chicago, and Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, seemed designed to draw protests and media coverage, the more-ubiquitous shadow surges across the country have been even more deadly—and disturbingly imprecise. When an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston in July, the Department of Homeland Security admitted that Salgado hadn’t even been the target of the stop. Six days later, an ICE agent in Maine shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, with ICE later admitting that he was also not the intended target of that operation. Reports also show that while arrests and detentions have soared to all-time highs this summer, deportations have remained level, largely because the immigrants being picked up do not have criminal records or deportation orders, or have open asylum cases. [Continue reading…]