DHS blasts Democrats, liberal media over gaslighting campaign about illegal alien shot by ICE
An individual identified by the Department of Homeland Security as an illegal alien from Venezuela was shot on Sunday during an immigration enforcement operation in Austin, Texas.
Democratic officials and the liberal media rushed to vilify Immigration and Customs Enforcement and characterize 28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garces Perez as a victim who has been subjected to inhumane treatment at the hands of federal authorities.
'He entered illegally under the Biden Administration.'
The DHS has, however, cast doubt on the veracity of the anti-ICE crowd's various claims regarding Perez's case.
"Sanctuary politicians and the mainstream media have wasted no time in spreading lies about an ICE officer-involved shooting of an illegal alien in Austin, Texas," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement.
"Contrary to their claims, this person is an illegal alien who has no legal status to be here and has been given some of the best medical care he’s ever received in his life," continued Mullin. "No amount of smears and false narratives will slow down ICE from doing its job by removing dangerous illegal aliens from our communities and making America safe again."
The DHS fact-checked numerous claims that have been advanced by Democrats and/or the liberal media since the incident.
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Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro (D) and multiple news outlets pushed the claim by Perez's immigration attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, that the Venezuelan was issued a work permit.
The DHS countered that Perez's "work permit expired in 2025" and noted that "a work permit does NOT grant legal status."
As for Goldfinch's complaint that Perez was ordered removed in absentia, the DHS replied, "Yes. This is why aliens must show up to their removal proceedings. Legal obligations do not end because someone’s address changed."
The DHS similarly rejected the suggestion by Castro and others that Perez lawfully entered the United States and is here legally, stating, "He entered illegally under the Biden administration. The illegal alien had no valid work permit, had no protective status, and had a final order of removal from a Department of Justice (DOJ) Immigration Judge."
In a letter to Sec. Mullin dated Tuesday, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and about 100 other Democratic lawmakers also claimed that Perez "is not receiving the care he needs in detention," has received no pain medication, and was forced to sleep on the floor.
The DHS said instead that Perez "is receiving medical care around the clock, including pain medication," and that he "was released from the hospital and arrived at the detention facility just a few hours later, where he slept on a bed."
Democrats further claimed in the letter that "there is no indication Mr. Garces Perez posed a threat to officers." However, newly released footage appears to show a car matching the description of Perez's vehicle speeding away from law enforcement.
"Resisting officers and evading arrest is dangerous for our officers, illegal aliens, and the public," said the DHS. "We remind the public that resisting officers and evading arrest is a felony and a federal crime."
His translator at a news conference Monday said, "He asked the ICE officer if he could please at least pull over so that they could detain him. They said no, and they side-swiped him, basically. He did a U-turn to try and find a spot to park so that he could go with them, and they basically ran into him and then shot him."
Perez is scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 30 in connection to his attorney's effort to challenge his deportation.
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Texas shuts down rioters, Democrats fan the flames after ICE shooting
Radicals waving foreign flags and leftist signage flooded the streets of North Austin on Sunday following a nonfatal shooting involving a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and a Venezuelan national.
As the sun set on a day full of anti-ICE rhetoric from Democratic officials, including Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, protesters turned violent, prompting a crackdown from Texas Department of Public Safety troopers.
The shooting
The shooting took place just before 1 p.m. on Sunday in the 8000 block of Anderson Square.
'I am ready to Melt ICE.'
Austin-Travis County EMS Rob Luckritz noted that the individual who caught the bullet — identified by his immigration attorney as 28-year-old Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a Venezuelan national allegedly working as a DoorDash driver — had stable vital signs but was nevertheless taken to Dell Seton Medical Center in "serious condition."
A video live streamed around the time of the shooting and reviewed by the New York Times captures the sound of screeching tires and a collision, then pivots to show a damaged Corolla driven by Perez stopped next to an SUV driven by an ICE officer, the NYT reported. The vehicles can be seen on the video facing in opposite directions.
In a different video obtained by ABC News that shows the aftermath of the shooting, Perez can be heard claiming in Spanish that he was shot for failing to "brake," the outlet reported.
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Homeland Security Investigations is now investigating the shooting with the help of the FBI.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the individual shot on Sunday is an "illegal alien from Venezuela, who illegally entered our country under the Biden administration and had a final order of removal, during a law enforcement operation today in Austin, TX."
Perez received treatment at the hospital and was transferred into ICE custody.
The Democratic reflex
Following the shooting, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson joined other Democrats in presuming the worst and attacking ICE, stating, "I am very angry and extremely disappointed that a person was shot on the streets of Austin by ICE. While I’m angry and disappointed, I’m not surprised. This has happened in other cities. With the rogue nature of ICE and the chaos we’re seeing fomented by ICE, there’s no reason to be surprised."
Texas Rep. Greg Casar (D) also seized the opportunity to remind everyone that he loathes federal immigration enforcement, stating, "The horror has come to our city: ICE has shot a person in Austin this morning."
"Just like Americans have from Minneapolis to Houston, Austinites will speak out peacefully against this deadly mass deportation machine. ICE has been terrorizing our country for far too long. We will not be silent," added Casar, the son of immigrants.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) tweeted, "Trump has allowed ICE to flood our streets and put our communities in harms [sic] way again and again and Governor Abbott is complicit every time."
Anchor-baby Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) accused the DHS of being the "biggest threat to our collective safety" and noting, "I am ready to Melt ICE and dismantle DHS!"
While admittedly short on information, Texas state Rep. Vikki Goodwin (D) stated, "This violence cannot continue."
The restoration of order
As Democrats took turns attacking ICE online, a horde of anti-ICE demonstrators rallied near the scene of the shooting, waving signs that said, "Stop ICE murder," "F**k ICE," "Moms against ICE," "Justice 4 Wilber," and "Abolish ICE."
The mob grew increasingly unruly, not only lobbing rocks and other projectiles at law enforcement but attempting on multiple occasions to march on the taped-off site of the shooting. The Texas Department of Public Safety troopers responded by firing pepper balls toward the radicals while Austin police officers in riot gear stood ready.
After deploying tear gas, tackling some rioters, and successfully dispersing the mob, whose assembly was declared unlawful, troopers left the scene around 11 p.m., reported NBC News.
Blaze News reached out to the Texas Department of Public Safety and the DHS for comment but did not immediately receive responses.
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I walked into my first DSA meeting looking for an answer to a very specific question: How do modern Marxists reckon with communism’s long history of atrocities?
In recent weeks, clips of Democratic Socialists of America leaders praising countries such as Cuba and China have gone viral. Other prominent socialists, including Hasan Piker, openly admire Lenin and Stalin and post pictures of themselves reading “What Is to Be Done?” while wearing Cartier.
Power is not only money or property. It is also the power to decide which history gets remembered and which gets reduced to a footnote.
Communist regimes killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century. So when I sat down for a DSA 101 lecture and was greeted as a comrade, I wanted to hear how the organization taught that history.
The answer was one of the more impressive acts of historical revisionism I have ever heard.
The DSA has built a coalition around oppression. Transgender people, racial minorities, immigrants, women, and people angry about the cost of health insurance are presented as members of classes exploited by a capitalist ruling order. In the room, confidence in the American dream was scarce. Resentment of the capitalist class was not.
That framework extends abroad. As the leader of my DSA 101 session put it, “A socialist approach is built on international solidarity and support. Socialists are internationalists.” Hence the fixation on Cuba, Venezuela, Gaza and the West Bank, and other places cast as victims of American power.
The problem is that several regimes the DSA treats sympathetically were devastated by Marxist rule itself.
Take the Soviet Union. During the Great Terror, roughly 700,000 people were executed. Millions more died through forced resettlement, the gulag, famine, and other state policies. One widely cited estimate puts the Soviet communist death toll at about 20 million.
Yet during the entire two-hour DSA course, the Soviet Union came up only once. The instructor praised it: “Socialists can be proud of our history. Some of the very first, most striking work [for feminist rights] occurred just after the October Revolution in the Soviet Union.”
That was it. The mass killing disappeared. Progressive feminism remained.
China received similar treatment. While discussing planned economies, the instructor praised the Chinese system for combining planning and markets in service of human need. Missing from that account was Mao Zedong’s rule, under which historians have estimated that as many as 70 million people died, many during famines ushered in through Marxist policies.
Cuba got the same reframing. The instructor blamed blockades, embargoes, and sanctions for depriving Cubans of “the chance to live in prosperity and dignity,” while praising the government for resisting America’s “oppressive” economic influence. Castro’s regime, according to historian R.J. Rummel, was responsible for as many as 141,000 deaths.
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The pattern became hard to miss. Marxist countries were not presented as failures so much as unfinished projects. Their progressive achievements were foregrounded; their victims were backgrounded. When socialist systems failed, capitalism, American imperialism, or the political class usually entered the explanation.
“The general attitude of socialism, which goes back to Marx and Lenin,” the instructor said, “is that when we are assigning blame … [it] is with the political class.” He spoke at length about the Pentagon and American power as sources of death and destruction. The deaths caused by Marxist governments? Nothing to see there.
If you let your opponent talk long enough, he will often tell you his strategy. That’s why I went.
The DSA did not exactly deny the horrors of 20th-century communism. It did something more useful: It barely taught them. The history was filtered through a moral framework in which socialists remain the champions of the oppressed and capitalism remains the prime suspect.
“It is the intention of the DSA to take power and wealth away from the capitalist class and put it in the hands of the working class,” the instructor said.
Power is not only money or property. It is also the power to decide which history gets remembered and which gets reduced to a footnote.
If young people learn about communist regimes chiefly through their promised ideals and progressive “wins,” while the bodies disappear from the lesson plan, they are not being taught communism’s history. They are being taught how to forget it.
South American Trial Could Reveal Key Facts About Iran Terror Network Targeting Americans
Panamanian authorities have a 1994 bombing’s suspected Iranian-backed Hezbollah mastermind in custody, with a trial ensuing soon.Trump changed the game with the 2020 files, now Congress must act
America remains deeply divided over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Millions believe the system failed them, while the media, intelligence bureaucracy, and the left have treated their doubts as something to suppress rather than investigate.
The documents released this week by the Trump administration do not close the case. They reopen it — and make the “nothing to see here” narrative indefensible.
Start with communist China.
The released intelligence reports that approximately 220 million American voter records are in Chinese hands. Tens of millions of records across 18 states were bought, stolen, or hacked and included names, addresses, phone numbers, party preferences, and other sensitive information.
A sovereign nation must know that the people selecting its government are its citizens.
That does not prove China changed a single ballot, but it does prove Beijing possessed a political targeting asset. When a strategic rival aggregates enormous datasets and applies modern analytics, it gains the ability to identify, target, and influence American voters at industrial scale.
The most disturbing disclosure involves the President’s Daily Brief — the president’s most sensitive and consequential intelligence product. In one released email, an official wrote: “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”
In a separate internal chat, a counterintelligence official boasted: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”
The left has spent years ridiculing concerns about a “deep state” as conspiracy theory. These revelations make that ridicule look increasingly like camouflage.
Then comes the voting-system reveal.
A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report included in the administration’s document release identifies weak access controls, outdated operating systems, flat networks, inadequate monitoring, and legacy remote-access pathways across state and local election environments. During multiple penetration tests and red-team exercises, CISA assessors gained full control of election-office networks within hours or days.
Separately, the report cites research involving one ballot-marking system showing that barcode-encoded votes could be altered without changing the human-readable selections displayed to the voter.
The release also includes intelligence concerning methods allegedly developed by Venezuela’s Maduro regime to manipulate electronic totals while concealing the changes.
Precision matters. A Venezuelan capability is not proof of an American operation. A demonstrated vulnerability is not proof it was exploited. The documents do not establish that American vote totals were secretly changed in 2020.
But they demolish the claim that election technology is immune from manipulation. These are computer systems with software, databases, vendors, administrators, updates, and attack surfaces. Compromise must be anticipated and independently detectable.
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A limited Department of Homeland Security review raises another alarm. The White House says it identified approximately 278,000 potential noncitizen registrations. DHS’ public follow-up described more than 250,000 preliminary potential matches in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — only four states.
No serious person should dismiss numbers of this magnitude. Biden’s certified Georgia margin in 2020 was 11,779 votes. In 2016, Trump carried Michigan and Wisconsin by a combined 33,452 votes — and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by just 77,744.
The media formula — “the documents do not prove vote totals changed; therefore they prove nothing” — is analytical malpractice. Absence of final proof is not proof of institutional innocence.
The proper question is whether this new information raises the probability that foreign influence, intelligence suppression, ineligible registrations, or exploitable technology played a larger role in the 2020 election environment than Americans were told — and whether future elections remain at risk.
The answer to both questions is yes.
That is why Congress must pass the SAVE America Act before November. The House-passed legislation requires documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration and photo identification for federal voting.
These are basic risk controls. Pew found that 83% of Americans — including 71% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans — support government-issued photo identification.
A sovereign nation must know that the people selecting its government are its citizens. A constitutional republic must demonstrate — not merely assert — that its elections are accurate.
Congress should stop stalling and pass the SAVE America Act. As the president likes to say: Let’s go.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Meet Election Attack Bombshell With The SAVE Act Or There Won’t Be A Republic Left To Save
We have a republic if we can keep it, and we will not keep it without the SAVE America Act.
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43 Leaders Dead. Still No End Game.