Law enforcement is essential work, but it is dangerous work. We ask public servants to enter volatile situations, confront people in crisis, and accept risks most citizens never face. Many choose the profession because they need a career; many choose it because they want to serve; some choose it because they are drawn to the challenge and the danger. Whatever the motivation, the work carries real stakes.
I have never been drawn to police work precisely because I respect the danger involved. It requires judgment, restraint, and sometimes genuine courage. Officers encounter armed suspects, domestic disputes, violent assaults, and people experiencing profound crises. They sometimes have only seconds to decide whether force is necessary.
But that is precisely why the use of force requires justification.
On Sunday, an ICE officer in Austin shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan DoorDash driver. Garcés Pérez had entered the United States through the CBP One process, applied for asylum, and—according to his attorneys—held a valid work permit. He also had a removal order after missing an immigration hearing that his lawyers say was sent to an old address.
Those facts can all be true.
None of them explains why he was shot.
A removal order may justify arrest. It does not justify deadly force. DHS policy permits shooting only when an officer reasonably believes someone presents an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. That is as it should be. A government agent carrying a gun does not acquire the right to shoot someone simply because the government has the right to take that person into custody.
Garcés Pérez says agents in an unmarked vehicle struck his car before he understood who was pursuing him, and that he was shot while still inside the vehicle. Accounts differ, and an investigation is underway. Perhaps evidence will emerge that he presented the kind of imminent threat that justified deadly force.
If so, the government should show it.
Because the burden belongs there.
Garcés Pérez is now suffering loss of mobility on his left side, with a bullet lodged near his spine. Before being returned to a hospital, he says he was transferred into immigration detention and slept on the floor while suffering from the gunshot wound.
And this is not an isolated case.
He is the third person shot by ICE officers in Texas since President Trump returned to office. The previous two shootings were fatal. Other immigration-enforcement operations around the country have ended in shootings and deaths as well.
People are being shot.
That fact should not disappear into an argument over immigration policy.
Immigration laws can be enforced. People subject to lawful removal orders can be arrested. ICE investigates trafficking, smuggling, and other serious crimes, and its agents sometimes encounter genuinely dangerous people.
But none of that lowers the threshold for shooting someone.
And none of it explains why civil immigration enforcement increasingly places heavily armed federal agents into encounters with people who have not been shown to present a danger to anyone. A person may be undocumented. He may have overstayed a visa. He may have missed an immigration hearing. He may even be subject to a valid removal order.
Those circumstances may justify immigration enforcement.
They do not make him dangerous.
And they certainly do not make him shootable.
There is a deeper problem as well. Civil immigration enforcement does not begin with danger. It begins with legal status—missed hearings, expired visas, civil removal orders. When the government turns those civil encounters into armed confrontations, it can introduce danger where none existed before. A system cannot manufacture danger and then automatically treat the danger it created as justification for the force it used.
Large-scale enforcement also disrupts workplaces and discourages even legally authorized immigrants from reporting to work. People become afraid not merely of deportation but of the encounter itself—unmarked vehicles, sudden stops, masked officers appearing in the middle of an ordinary day.
It is difficult to describe that as courage. It is even harder to describe it as humane.
Government possesses extraordinary power. It can arrest us. It can confine us. In immigration matters, it can remove people from the country. And in the rare circumstances in which someone presents an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, its agents may use deadly force.
But the order matters.
The danger justifies the force.
The force does not establish the danger after the fact.
Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez was delivering food. He had authorization to work. He also had a removal order.
An ICE officer shot him.
Perhaps the government will establish that there was a compelling reason to do so.
Until then, the fact that it had the power to shoot him is not an explanation for why it did.