His car is still sitting there

An ICE kidnapping in Austin

Luke O'Neil

23 Sep 2026 • 9 min read

by Joel Pinckney

There’s a gray Subaru Impreza parked on Hunters Trace in Austin. It has sat there, unmoved, since 8am last Saturday. You can see it just where you turn right onto the street from Rundberg. I walk this way almost every morning with my kid.

On Saturday we went a different route, looping around a few other streets before approaching Hunters Trace from the other direction. It was a beautiful, quiet morning; we had the streets almost entirely to ourselves. Earlier in the walk, we had stopped for a while to watch a couple of squirrels chase each other up and down a tree; my three-year-old was delighted when one of them paused, looked at us, and flicked their tail, as if acknowledging our presence. As if seeing us there meant something to them.

Not long after I saw an unmarked black car quickly flash blue lights and swerve in front of a small hatchback. Behind, another unmarked car turned on its lights. The driver of the hatchback was boxed in; he had no way out, no choice but to stop. He was alone in his car, alone on the streets—there were no other cars going in either direction. I watched as masked ICE agents exited the two cars, removed the driver from the hatchback, and put him in handcuffs, depositing him in the vehicle in front. He didn’t resist, so far as I could tell.

I know nothing about this man, except where he was at 8am on Saturday; except that I was the last person to catch a glimpse of him before he officially entered the hell and terror of ICE detention. I can imagine he knew this day might come; I can imagine people he loved had disappeared without explanation, and yet with but one explanation; I can imagine people who loved him spent much of Saturday trying to reach him, looking for him at his usual places, before reaching the horrible, desolate, unavoidable conclusion that so many here and across the country have had no choice but to reach in recent months.

This man was taken amidst what has been referred to as a shadow surge: ICE arrests are way up across the country, and ICE’s tactics, often thanks to the willing collaboration of state and local police, are much more subtle than they were even just a few months ago. Texas leads the country in ICE arrests, as a September 22 piece in the Austin American Statesman pointed out, “with more than 1 in 5 U.S. arrests this year occurring in the state.” The Statesman piece also noted that ICE arrests in Austin tripled this summer. The surge here has been particularly concentrated in the Rundberg/North Lamar area of North Austin, as highlighted recently in the Austin Chronicle, an area of town with a particularly large immigrant presence. The majority of these arrests are happening in the shadows, during quiet hours, when almost no one is looking.

After putting him into their vehicle, one of the ICE agents got in the driver’s seat of the hatchback, turned it onto Hunters Trace, and parked it where it still, today, sits. I’d seen one other woman walking on the other side of the street; she quickly walked away when it became clear what was happening. A moving van had turned on to Rundberg from Hunters Trace just as the ICE agents were removing him from his vehicle, and kept going past us in the opposite direction. To my knowledge, no one else witnessed what happened. On the video I took, after ICE drives off, I hear birds singing; I hear my three-year-old asking why.

Within three minutes, the quiet of the morning, interrupted for just a few brief moments, had returned. To anyone walking by at 8:05, the car parked there on would have meant nothing; it would have been as if nothing happened. It feels like a tear in the fabric of the universe, that anyone seeing that car would have had no way of knowing what its presence represented; that it was the only visual acknowledgment that ICE had taken someone there just a few minutes prior, beginning what may have been the worst day of his life—perhaps excluding the days that have followed it. Shouldn’t the car be able to share the story that it holds? Isn’t it bursting with meaning? I can’t help but think of the biblical passage in Luke, where Jesus says that “the very stones would cry out” if his disciples were silent, such is the force of what they have to say.

After the ICE agents left with the driver, I walked up to the car to see if I could learn anything of use. In the well of the passenger seat sat a white Styrofoam cooler; an Uber Eats cooler bag was folded up on the seat. I imagine, perhaps, that the driver had just begun his day delivering food; maybe he was headed to his first pickup, or maybe the Styrofoam cooler held his first delivery. There it all sits, still, in the Subaru Impreza, parked on the corner of Rundberg and Hunters Trace.

A little more than 24 hours later, Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot by ICE agents at Research Boulevard and Anderson Square, just over a mile away from where the hatchback sits. According to reports, Garces Perez was shot while delivering for DoorDash. We later learned that he was released by the hospital back into ICE’s custody after a mere four hours there, without pain medication, the bullet still lodged in his back. He was taken to Pearsall Detention Center, nearly three hours away from Austin, where he lost feeling on the left side of his body. According to his attorney, he now sits in an isolation cell, given only ibuprofen and Tylenol to deal with the pain of the barely-treated gunshot wound, retaliated against for speaking to the press.

I’ve thought about these two men almost constantly over the last few days: about the precarity of the labor they were doing; about the vulnerable, lonely position they were in when ICE tracked them down; about the cars they left behind. I was told that Garces Perez’ car, riddled with bullet holes, was towed away in the hours after he was shot and taken by ICE. Not so the car of the man I saw taken. I suppose even ICE knows that the ghosts some vehicles hold are too much to bear, that they too transparently tell a story, too obviously an indictment; others can blend in, the meaning they hold indiscernible to all who encounter them. One day, the city will come and tow them away.

I know nothing about the man I saw taken, and have seen no reporting on him, except that his life was precious; except that he deserved love and safety, care and kindness. I walk past his car every morning. A few times a day, I drive down Rundberg and glance up Hunters Trace. Every time I see his car, I try to hold some kind of quiet vigil. If you find yourself nearby, I hope you’ll do the same. Drive by and hold him in your mind; say a prayer for the man who’s name we’ll almost certainly never know, whose world changed forever in the quiet of a Saturday morning, taken by masked agents of the state who only wished him harm.

Joel Pinckney is a writer and book worker living in Austin, Texas.

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A related poem of mine.

Who will clean any of this up?

At a church service in Chicago they had set up cardboard cutouts in the pews to represent the worshippers who would have attended mass if not for fear of being disappeared. Not far away I saw a laborer’s lunch had been left uneaten and spilled over onto the sidewalk outside of a home he must have just been working on. Laboring on. There’s a dumpster out front and a red white and blue flag themed porta-potty from a company called Patriot Portables. Three ladders still leaning up against the building.

It looks like it would have been a pretty tasty lunch. Even tossed aside like that and wasted now. A smear of orange hot sauce on the cracked styrofoam container. Not yet taken away by the wind. Such a beautiful seeming neighborhood too. I imagine it’s a very nice place to live. They say that Chicago is still surprisingly affordable.

It shows me home listings when I scroll now because I clicked on one or two at some point and so the computer believes that this is an integral datapoint that explains who I am. I just saw one hanging ten off a bluff that has been pummeled by eons of waves and so will not exist for much longer. Neither house nor bluff. Overlooking the water on Cape Cod. You could squeeze a couple of good years out of it still I thought. Until one awful night. I can’t afford it even now despite the implication but it’s a nice little nightmare to have.

I thought of a friend who was recently diagnosed with a terrible albeit not yet terminal disease but maybe that’s a bad analogy. A beach house is worth so much more than a person.

I don’t know how much longer it will sit there. Either the house or the guy’s lunch. Maybe everyone passing by assumes another worker is going to arrive soon to take care of it but it could be he’s already been disappeared himself.

Some further reading on ICE kidnapping and violence in Hell World.