By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and wounded a 28-year-old delivery driver inside his own car in Austin, Texas, in an encounter caught partly on video that has since circulated widely.
The man, identified by his attorney as Venezuelan, is now in federal custody. His lawyer told CBS News the bullet remains lodged near his spine. NBC News reported new video shows what its correspondent Ryan Chandler described as the "chaotic moments" surrounding the shooting, though the network's account does not establish what precipitated the officer's decision to fire.
Neither ICE nor Austin police has offered a detailed public account, based on available reporting, of the sequence of events leading up to the shooting. That gap matters: a man was shot while working a delivery job, and the public record so far consists of a lawyer's account of his injuries and video described but not fully narrated by network correspondents.
The incident lands amid a summer and fall of intensified immigration enforcement activity nationwide, and it is likely to draw scrutiny from civil liberties advocates and immigration attorneys watching how ICE conducts encounters with civilians who are not the direct targets of enforcement action. This paper could not independently confirm additional details of the officer's identity or the internal review status of the shooting as of publication.
[Editor's note: The specific circumstances that led the officer to fire have not been established in available reporting and should not be inferred.]
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by NBC News and CBS News.
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