An empty suburban street at dusk, red and blue emergency light glow reflecting off wet pavement, parked cars in shadow, no people, no text, no signage.

PoliticsBBC · ReutersSep 23, 2026

A Venezuelan man shot by an ICE officer in Texas was hospitalized for paralysis, as a judge blocked his deportation

A Venezuelan man was shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Texas, leaving him hospitalized for treatment of paralysis before he was returned to immigration detention, according to his lawyer. A federal judge has since blocked his deportation and set a hearing in the case, while police have released some video from the scene of the shooting, which is drawing wider scrutiny of ICE's use of force amid a broader expansion of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. The man, who worked as a DoorDash driver, addressed reporters by phone from his hospital bed at a press conference organized by his legal team, describing the encounter that left him paralyzed. The case has become a flashpoint in an ongoing legal and political fight over the limits of force immigration officers may use, adding to a string of incidents this year that have drawn federal court scrutiny of ICE tactics.

Analogies

Relatives wave goodbye to a train expelling 1,500 people from Los Angeles to Mexico, 20 August 1931

The Mexican Repatriation, 1929-1936

Immigration officers rarely informed detainees of their rights... deportees were seldom represented by a lawyer, a privilege that could only be granted at the discretion of the immigration officer.

Mass deportation drive in which up to a third of Mexicans in the US were removed, many of them US citizens denied hearings or counsel →

The Rodney King video, 1991

Can we all get along?

George Holliday's videotape of LAPD officers beating Rodney King, which made bystander video the evidence at the center of a use-of-force case →

Portrait of Upton Sinclair, 1906

"Durham's Pure Leaf Lard"

when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906), on immigrant workers maimed and killed in the meatpacking plants →

"The New Colossus" (1883)

Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus, sonnet inscribed on a bronze plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty since 1903 →

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth, I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian and indeed I am an Italian.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, statement to the court before sentencing, Dedham, Massachusetts, 9 April 1927 — later the subject of Ben Shahn's 1931-32 gouache series The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti →

Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi by Nadar, c. 1866

"Va, pensiero"

Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate; va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli

Giuseppe Verdi, Nabucco (1842), the Hebrew slaves' chorus of exile and lost homeland →