A Venezuelan immigrant is in a detention center after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot him in the back on Sunday. The incident left a bullet lodged near his spine, according to his lawyer.
“This morning he reported to me that they shackled him yesterday afternoon and took him to a hospital where he was given an IV drip, he was not provided surgery, he still has the bullet in his body, he’s got his arm in a sling and he’s back at the detention center, and now reporting to me that he’s been placed in isolation with a regular bed as opposed to a medical bed and he’s in a lot of pain, he just on Tylenol and Ibuprofen,” his lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch told Here & Now’s Indira Lakshmanan on Tuesday.
The Department of Homeland Security says he entered the country illegally.
Lincoln-Goldfinch says Garces Perez entered legally and applied for asylum.
3 Questions with Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch
Have you been in touch with your client? Is he getting medical care?
“I was finally able to speak to him this morning at 8 o’clock after no contact for almost an entire day.
“We had a press conference yesterday and he happened to call his wife during the press conference and he wanted to speak to the press so we put him on speaker phone and after that occurred the guards came in and took his tablet away and told him that his communication privileges had been revoked.
“And so we didn’t hear anything from him, but Congressman Joaquin Castro’s office visited him and told us that he was losing mobility in his left arm because the bullet is lodged near his spine. So, his family and I spent the night very concerned for him.
Are there legal methods to force him to get medical attention?
“We’ve filed a temporary restraining order, and we have a hearing before Judge Orlando Garcia next Wednesday, September 30, and he has ordered that Wilbur be present at that hearing, which is good because it means that he can’t be deported in the meantime. But I of course am concerned about the retaliation that it appears he is suffering and the treatment in detention.”
You say your client entered legally using an app developed during the Biden administration. The app was canceled by the Trump administration. The Department of Homeland Security says your client entered the country illegally. What is your response?
“I mean that’s just a lie. He did enter on, it’s called CBP One, it was a program that people applied for, you had to submit a photo and a background check, and do this app.
“And he was admitted under CBP one, he applied for asylum, he had a valid work permit, he has an active driver’s license. And the reason they’re reporting he had a removal order is because the immigration court sent the notice of his hearing to a previous address and so he didn’t know he had a hearing and he didn’t appear and received a deportation order in absentia, which is very common.
“So, while he did technically have an order of removal, there’s an explanation for it and then of course it certainly doesn’t warrant what happened to him.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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