Prosecutors' own charging document proves body-camera footage of the shooting exists; prosecutors still won't release it.

…(cont) The order these things happened in mattered to Frank, so I gave it to him straight, one date at a time. On the 20th, an ICE officer shot Garcés Pérez during a traffic stop near Research Boulevard and Anderson Square, an intersection nobody in Austin thinks about until something happens there. The next day, the Department of Homeland Security announced that its own investigations unit — inside the same department the officer works for — would be the one leading the investigation into the officer. The day after that, a federal judge temporarily blocked his deportation, on his attorney's account. Temporarily. On an order the government had already called closed.

I asked Frank if that was ordinary, a judge pausing something the government had already stamped finished. He said courts do that; that's what a court is for, pausing things the other side calls settled. Fair enough. I wrote that down too.

Then Tuesday's filing came in, and this is the part I called Frank back about, because I didn't trust myself to read it the same way twice. The affidavit charging Garcés Pérez with assault says he was driving past an agent when the mirror on his car struck the agent, and that a second agent shot him right after. Fine — that's what the document says; I'm not arguing with it. But the same filing also says the agent who fired wasn't wearing a body camera, and the agent standing beside him had a camera running and then switched it off. And somewhere in the middle of all that, the filing itself refers to footage of the shooting — footage the case leans on to make its point. The government's own charging document confirms a tape exists. The government has not shown anyone the tape.

Frank didn't have much for that part. He said his end of the business is affidavits, not evidence releases — that's somebody else's drawer to open.

I thanked him and started to let him go. Actually — hold on, since I've still got you, one more thing. That word you used for his order — is that a word this office throws around loosely, or does it mean what you told me: no appeals, nowhere left to go? They used it on him. I'm wondering whether anybody over there plans to use it on the tape too, or whether, around that building, it just means not yet final.