ICE shot a DoorDash driver who wasn't their target. He's now detained with a bullet near his spine.

Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan immigrant, was delivering orders for DoorDash in Austin on Sunday when ICE officers ran his license plate and found a deportation order on file, according to two people familiar with the shooting who spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity. He was not the target of an immigration operation, those people said.

Officers pulled him over around 12:45 p.m. and told him he was being arrested. He fled in his car, the two people said, and a short chase followed before officers encountered him again. What happened next is partly captured on video.

The Times synchronized and analyzed visual and audio evidence showing an ICE officer standing to the side of Garcés Pérez's blue Toyota Corolla — which was rolling forward — when the officer apparently fired through the rear passenger window. No other officers were visible near the car. Footage shows Garcés Pérez with a wound on his back.

Garcés Pérez told reporters by phone that his vehicle was rammed by an ICE agent before he was shot. The Times reported that he said his car was struck twice by gunfire before he was hit. Local television footage showed the Corolla with damage to the passenger-side door.

The bullet fractured his clavicle and lodged near his spinal cord. "I'm in a lot of pain," he told reporters. "At the hospital where they took me they couldn't remove the bullet because it's close to the spinal cord." His lawyer, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, posted on X that he was later moved to another hospital because he was experiencing left-side paralysis.

He was released from the hospital back into ICE custody. He told the Washington Post he was rushed out of the hospital and forced to sleep on the floor of a detention center within hours of being shot. Lincoln-Goldfinch told CBS he had called his wife from the hospital while "yelling in pain."

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a Democrat, said residents have "a right to know what happened" and "a right to feel safe in their city." He said the city would be involved in the investigation and that ICE operations have surged in Austin in recent weeks. Congressman Greg Casar, also a Democrat, demanded an independent investigation, the release of body camera footage, and "accountability for any ICE officer who broke the law."

The shooting follows others involving ICE. The agency shot and killed Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop; the Department of Homeland Security said he was not a target of an ICE investigation. Earlier this month the Justice Department charged an ICE agent with lying about a non-fatal shooting of a Venezuelan migrant in Minnesota — a rare instance of a federal agent being accused of breaking the law on the job.

Protesters gathered at the scene in Austin, some carrying Mexican and Guatemalan flags, demanding that ICE leave the city.