Illinois authorities are investigating the case of a citizen who was hospitalized with wounds after being detained by federal immigration agents on Sunday. The case widened after Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, said he was still carrying a bullet in his back from a shooting that left him in pain and fighting to stay out of custody.
Pérez said doctors did not remove the bullet because it was close to his spine. He also said immigration authorities wanted him discharged quickly so he could be taken to a detention center, even though his injuries had not fully healed. That is why the case has drawn attention beyond one arrest: it raises questions about what happened after the detention and who was making medical decisions in the hours that followed.
The same Sunday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and seriously wounded a DoorDash driver in Austin, Texas. Those two episodes now sit side by side in the public record: one investigation in Illinois and one shooting in Texas, both involving federal immigration enforcement and both leaving a citizen or resident in medical care. The overlap has made the Illinois review harder to dismiss as a routine complaint.
Pérez said he later found himself in a detention setting without medication or treatment for pain. He said, in effect, that the bullet remained in place because surgeons judged it too close to the spinal column to remove safely. Those claims point to a difficult gap in the case: the line between emergency care and custody, and whether that line was crossed too fast.
His lawyer says Pérez has now returned to the hospital. That leaves Illinois investigators with the part that matters most: whether a citizen was hurried toward detention before his condition was stable, and whether the handling of his injuries matched the care a seriously wounded patient should have received.
