Since Republicans in the US Senate this week blocked a bill to make school bus stops off-limits for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, community members in Pennsylvania and Austin, Texas have expressed outrage by arrests made in front of children—in at least one reported case, leaving a child abandoned as officers detained his…
Page T2From§Eachthe supper edition — 2 October 2026
ICE shoots man, charges him with assaulting the shooter, keeps access to school bus stops this week.
As it ran on the front
In September, on a Sunday, an ICE officer running removal operations shoots Wilber Rafael Garces Perez during a traffic stop in Austin. He is twenty-eight, a DoorDash driver. By Monday he is in federal custody, not a hospital, the bullet still lodged near his spine, and officers are asking him questions. His own account of this reaches reporters by phone, because the man is not free to walk into the room where they are waiting. Eight days after the stop, prosecutors file the charge they have been building — not against the officer who fired, but against Garces Perez, for assaulting the man who shot him.
The bullet waits longer than the paperwork. It stays in his back through the arraignment, through the detention hearing, through eleven days in federal custody, until a hospital finally removes it this week — "good news," his supporters call it, because by then merely getting it out counts as a win.…
…(cont) That same week, the Senate takes up a different question: whether school bus stops should be the one place ICE cannot work. Senate Republicans vote it down. Within days, in Pennsylvania and in Austin, the bill's defeat has a face — an officer drives off with the mother of a nine-year-old, and the boy is left crying on the pavement outside his bus stop, surrounded by neighbors instead of his mother. Austin's mayor pro tempore, José "Chito" Vela III, posts the video and names what it is, not an accident, a repeated choice: "ICE doesn't have to traumatize children... and treat people like this."
Run the two stories together and they are one story. An agency shoots a man, charges him instead of the officer, and holds him eleven days with the evidence still inside him — and the same week, the body meant to check that agency votes instead to guarantee it keeps working the sidewalk outside an elementary school. Nobody in either building needed new authority to do any of this. The bullet didn't need removing for the operation to continue, and the bus stop didn't need protecting for the Senate to decide it wouldn't be.
That's the through-line: accountability for ICE flows exactly one direction, toward the people it detains. The man it shoots gets a charge. The agency gets a vote in its favor. The kids crying at the bus stop get a quote from the mayor pro tem and a promise that it has to stop — which, this week, it did not.
“They shoot the man, then charge him for getting shot, then the Senate makes sure they can run the same play outside your kid's bus stop. This isn't a mistake somebody's fixing, it's a system working exactly as funded. Follow the bullet from his spine to that curb in Austin — same agency, same immunity, bigger radius.”
“Look, the assault charge is just the law applying evenly — you resist an officer, even one who shot you, that's still assault, that's not political. And the bus stop bill was redundant anyway, ICE already has guidance on sensitive locations, they don't need Congress telling them not to — did I just defend leaving a nine-year-old crying at a bus stop? That's not where I meant to land this.”
Earlier in this story
- ICE shoots man, charges him with assaulting the officer who shot him, removes the bullet eleven days later. By Sal · the early bird edition, 2 October 2026
The receipts
The UN torture rapporteur found direct-contact electric shock gloves "incompatible with the absolute prohibition of torture" - ICE plans to spend up to $20 million on them ABC10 San Diego / UN Special Rapporteur finding, August 2026
Venezuelan man shot by ICE has bullet removed 11 days laterWilber Rafael Garces Perez, the Venezuelan man who was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during a traffic stop in Austin, Texas, had a bullet removed from his back Thursday, nearly two weeks after the shooting. “Good news: Wilber Garces Perez finally had surgery to remove the bullet that was in his back […]
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.