Joaquin Castro: 'Lawless' ICE Basically Torturing People

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is basically torturing people, like the Venezuelan man who was shot by an agent Sunday in Austin, Texas.

Anchor Jake Tapper said, “A video from the Austin Police Department released at the press conference in the last hour, showing the moments after 28 year old Wilber Rafael Garces Perez was shot in the back by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas, while delivering for DoorDash on Sunday. You can see him getting out of the car placed in handcuffs, a police officer cutting off his shirt. One of your staffers went to the ICE facility in Texas holding Perez. You plan on seeing him tomorrow? What new information did you learn today?”

Castro said, “I have to say that the way they have treated Wilber Rafael Garces Perez comes pretty close to torture. And the reason I say that is because they shot him in the back. They took him to a hospital, but shortly after that, they took him to an ICE processing center, where he was made to lie on the floor, was not given pain medication or any way to ease his pain, was then taken to a detention center, which is basically like a prison, a former prison in Pearsall, Texas. And he was an excruciating pain. He could not move the left side of his body, and they were still refusing to take him to the hospital. It wasn’t until hours after that that they finally took him to the hospital, and then again took him back to the ICE detention center again, without giving him the medication and treatment that he needed. That is basically torture.”

He added, “You can’t run an agency in this kind of lawless way and expect that the Congress is going to continue to give you billions and billions of dollars in the way that this Republican majority Congress has. It’s not right. Again, this essentially amounts to a kind of torture.”

Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN