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On Sept. 30, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which he said will give his office's investigators a "greater ability to work side by side" with federal agents to track down their targets. Six of Indiana's 92 county sheriffs have signed similar agreements, and ICE recently detained 426 people in the state during an operation called Operation Safe Community.
In his announcement, Rokita said agreements like these only add to law enforcement's ability to keep communities safe by allowing some local officers to act as immigration officers. What he did not address is what happens when one of those federal agents fires a weapon.
Ten days before Rokita’s announcement, on Sept. 20, an ICE agent shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old DoorDash driver, during a traffic stop in North Austin, Texas. ICE was running targeted license-plate checks and pulled over Garces Perez, who is Venezuelan, after finding a final removal order tied to his car. Garces Perez’s lawyer argued he entered the United States legally and has a work permit.
Prosecutors say Garces Perez fled, his mirror struck an officer, and the agent claims he fired in self-defense, hitting him with a single bullet to the back, after Garces Perez allegedly tried to hit the agent with the car post-chase.
Garces Perez offers a different account, saying unmarked vehicles rammed into his car, and he was shot after being forced to a stop.
The officer who shot Garces Perez wore no body camera and was never interviewed by the lead investigator. The other officer at the scene described him firing three times through the rear window, which complicates the self-defense claim.
Since Trump took office in 2025, ICE agents have shot 25 people across the country, killing nine. Former acting ICE director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Feb. 12, 2026, that the agency was also investigating these cases for wrongdoing.
Of the 37 cases, 18 were closed and 19 are still pending review. Lyons did not indicate if any resulted in terminations during the committee hearing. The only criminal accountability first came from Minnesota state prosecutors, not the federal government. They charged ICE agent Christian Castro after he fired into a Minneapolis home in January, wounding a man in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The DHS called that arrest unlawful. However, federal prosecutors finally took some form of action this month, charging that agent with lying to the FBI, not with the shooting. The agent resigned from the agency effective May 31, 2026.
The Austin, Texas, shooting comes two months after ICE agents killed two men in unrelated cases less than a week apart: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13.
Those were the first fatal ICE shootings since January, when Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. The Department of Justice declined to investigate. The FBI supervisor assigned to the Minneapolis field office, Tracee Mergen, resigned after reporting she was pressured to shift the investigation from a civil rights inquiry away from Ross and instead pursue a case against Good, treating the victim as the suspect. Ross was placed on three days of administrative leave and reassigned to an undisclosed state.
In Chicago, ICE killed Silverio Villegas González in September 2025 and Illinois State Police only opened an investigation eight months later after a state commission released a report. DHS has since said federal prosecutors declined to charge the agent. In Texas, U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez was killed by an ICE agent in March 2025 and DHS did not publicly acknowledge the death for nearly a year.
The DHS inspector general launched an audit in January specifically to determine whether ICE even conducts use-of-force investigations at all. That audit has been running for more than eight months. No findings have been published. On Sept. 7, Illinois lawmakers were still asking for a timetable for a final report.
The problem is not only that ICE agents keep firing their weapons, but that DHS and private investigators are not taking any actions to hold the agents responsible. Every one of these shootings has followed the same pattern — one where the DHS publishes its own narrative within hours, and if the video evidence or witnesses contradict it, the case suddenly disappears into an internal review.
The only time an agent faced real consequences was because a state prosecutor refused to wait for the federal government, and even then, the DHS fought against it. A department that cannot provide the public with a clear narrative when its own officers shoot someone should not be trusted to decide whether those officers did anything wrong.
Congress should take these cases out of the DHS's hands. Every shooting by an ICE agent should be investigated by an agency outside the department, with findings released to the public on a fixed deadline, and the outcomes of the 18 investigations Lyons called closed should be published now.
Until that happens, state prosecutors should follow Minnesota's lead and open their own cases instead of waiting for Washington. That now includes Indiana. If state investigators are going to work side- by- side with ICE agents, Rokita owes Hoosiers a public answer on who investigates when one of those agents shoots someone here, and whether the findings will ever be released. Otherwise, every family in these stories, and eventually one in Indiana, is being asked to take the word of the same agency that pulled the trigger.
Max Moore (he/him) is a senior studying political science and journalism.
