Why Did Ice Shoot This Boy in The Chest? Any Reason One Can Think Of??
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| A year later, and with a bullet lodged in his spine, José García-Sorto still wants answers. |
Allison McCann first spoke with José García-Sorto when he was in immigration detention and later met him at his home in Gualcince, Honduras.
New York Times
The last thing José García-Sorto remembers after being shot in the chest is being pulled from his car, pinned to the pavement and handcuffed, his blood pooling around him on a Phoenix interstate. All he could think about was what would happen to his two young children if he died.
Mr. García-Sorto had awoken early that morning, before 4 a.m., to get to his job framing houses. He drank a single cup of coffee, said goodbye to his wife and told her he would be back after work.
He did not know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been surveilling his apartment complex that morning, or that agents had been there three days earlier looking for someone else. ICE officers had run the license plates of cars parked at the complex and identified 18 other “targets.” One of them was Mr. García-Sorto, a Honduran immigrant.
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A few minutes after he left home, he said, a vehicle pulled up close and flashed its lights. “I thought it was the police,” he recalled, speaking in Spanish.
He said he pulled off the highway onto the exit ramp, where a truck abruptly pulled in front of him. Then a car hit him from behind. He stopped his car just as two more unmarked vehicles surrounded him. Several officers jumped out. “Suddenly, they were there with their guns drawn, pointing them right at me,” he said.
It was dark, but he remembered seeing around seven officers, most of them in tactical gear, their faces obscured by masks. One pounded on the driver’s side window, demanding that he open the door. That’s when he realized the officers were from ICE. He refused; he was afraid.
An officer smashed open the driver’s side window, Mr. García-Sorto said, and then he felt something fly past him. That was the first shot. The second bullet hit him squarely in the chest.
“‘Why did you do it? Why did you shoot me?’” Mr. García-Sorto, now 25, recalled asking the officers as they pulled him from the car. He had crossed the border illegally in 2023 but had no criminal record.
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He doesn’t remember much of the hours after that. An ambulance arrived and transported him to a hospital. His lung had collapsed, his liver had been lacerated and a bullet had lodged in his spine.
Later, when he woke up, he saw that his hands and feet were handcuffed to the hospital bed. Several F.B.I. agents were there, waiting to speak with him.
ICE officers are trained to fire their weapons only if there is an imminent danger to themselves or to the public. But Mr. García-Sorto was never charged with a crime as a result of the encounter on the Phoenix highway — suggesting the authorities did not find evidence that he had put anyone in danger, and calling into question the reason he was shot at all.
The shooting took place last October, about nine months into President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. In the year since, strikingly similar episodes have played out again and again. In Houston, Maine and New York City, immigration arrests during vehicle stops have turned violent — or worse, fatal.
All told, federal immigration agents have fired upon at least 25 people since Mr. Trump returned to office, killing six of them and injuring most of the others.
Family members and lawmakers continue to plead for independent investigations and accountability, but the federal government has not made public a single investigation into these shootings.
Even less is understood about the consequences for the people who are shot, many of whom are largely forgotten as soon as the next violent episode occurs. Mr. García-Sorto’s experience, which he allowed The New York Times to document over several months, offers a rare view into the aftermath of these events — from the days he spent in the hospital until his deportation to Honduras, where he now lives with his wife and children.
He still doesn’t know who shot him or why.
“These incidents just get left as they are, nothing happens,” he said. “Someone like me isn’t worth anything.”
The evidence
The Department of Homeland Security’s version of events is this: Mr. García-Sorto initially stopped his car, but as ICE officers approached on foot, he began to drive away. An officer who was in the path of the vehicle feared for his life and fired two shots, a spokesperson for the agency said.
Both shots passed through the front windshield on the passenger’s side, photographs of the car show.
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No video of the shooting has surfaced. Videos taken by a local news station about 30 minutes afterward show Mr. García-Sorto’s car was surrounded on three sides by unmarked federal vehicles, with a steep gravel embankment to its left. The front wheels of the car were turned to the left, away from where the bullets entered the windshield.
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Two bullet holes in
front windshield on
passenger side.
Wheels
turned to
left.
García-
Sorto’s
car
A transcript of the 911 call placed at the time sheds some light on the circumstances. An officer told the dispatcher that the officers at the scene were not physically injured, though one was “having hyperventilation issues.” The apprehension “went south,” another officer explained.
The response by D.H.S. to shootings involving ICE officers has often followed a playbook. The agency quickly issues a statement saying the shooting was justified and the officer fired defensively. The Justice Department then brings charges of assaulting a federal officer against the person who was shot, though many of those cases have fallen apart in court.
But that’s not what happened to Mr. García-Sorto.
The F.B.I. investigated the shooting, but no charges were brought against him. Brooke Brennan, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I.’s Phoenix office, declined to share the results of the investigation with The Times and referred questions about charging decisions to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Esther Winne, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney in Arizona, said the office would not comment on its reasons for declining the case. The officer did not face charges, either.
Facing mounting public backlash, ICE recently issued new guidance instructing officers not to make vehicle stops if they had not completed specific training. The agency also mandated that officers wear and activate their body cameras. But during a recent shooting in Austin, Texas, the officer who fired his weapon wasn’t wearing one.
The hospital
After the shooting, Mr. García-Sorto was admitted to the Deer Valley Medical Center in northern Phoenix in critical condition. His medical record said he had symptoms “consistent with a significant degree of immediate risk to life.”
One of the doctors who treated him that morning said that the most pressing concern was his collapsed lung. (The doctor spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions at work.) A chest tube was inserted to drain the blood from the area around Mr. García-Sorto’s lung. The doctors then moved on to his liver — he needed an embolization to stop the bleeding.
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| Mr. García-Sorto said he still experiences pain in his back and is often short of breath, nearly a year after he was shot. |
They decided not to remove the bullet from his spine because the retrieval would have created more issues than leaving it alone, the doctor said. He was prescribed antibiotics to fight any potential infection from the bullet.
Over the next few days, Mr. García-Sorto was in and out of consciousness, but he was improving. He said the F.B.I. agents had advised him to hire a lawyer.
The doctor who treated Mr. García-Sorto said federal agents asked repeatedly about his status, whether he needed to remain at the hospital and why. The D.H.S. spokesperson said claims that officers would pressure doctors to release a patient were false.
A week after he arrived, he was released into ICE custody. His medical records described him as “stable for transportation and detention,” but Mr. García-Sorto said that when he stood up to leave the hospital, he collapsed. People had to help carry him out. “I couldn’t walk much because I felt like I was suffocating,” he said.
All this time, his wife, Yanely Benítez, wasn’t sure whether he was dead or alive, or what she should tell their children. “I knew nothing,” Ms. Benítez recalled in Spanish. “My children wouldn’t eat, and my son would fall asleep at the doorway, crying for his father.”
D.H.S. said publicly that Mr. García-Sorto had been taken to a hospital, but nobody had told her where. She tried calling a few local hospitals herself, but none had a patient by his name. The family didn’t yet have a lawyer or anyone to help.
She didn’t hear from him until he was out of the hospital and in ICE custody, at an immigration detention facility about an hour away from Phoenix.
Life before
The youngest of eight, Mr. García-Sorto attended school until only the sixth grade. His father, José Lucio García, said he was a happy child who was “pretty strong” and would often join him at work, harvesting corn and beans in the hillsides of Gualcince, a small town on the western edge of Honduras.
He met Ms. Benítez when he was 20, and by the time they welcomed their first child together about a year later, he was eager to make his way to the United States to find work. Most of his siblings had done the same.
In early 2023, he traveled by bus through Guatemala and Mexico before crossing the border on foot in the desert near Eagle Pass, Texas. Ms. Benítez and their young son joined him about four months later.
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| Mr. García-Sorto at home with his parents, José Lucio García and Marina Sorto. |
They started out living in Florida with one of his sisters, but Mr. García-Sorto heard that the construction jobs in Arizona paid better, and they soon moved to Phoenix.
For the next two years, they started to build a life there. Mr. García-Sorto had a steady job in construction and Ms. Benítez worked a cleaning job at a mall. They welcomed a second child, a daughter, in late 2024 — the first U.S. citizen in the family.
Just before the shooting, Mr. García-Sorto had gotten a promotion, and his pay had increased to $250 a day, up from $180 for a 12-hour shift. He and Ms. Benítez threw a bumblebee-themed party for their daughter’s first birthday and made plans to look for a bigger apartment.
“He always said that his dream was to work, and to give his children a better future,” said his older sister, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared being targeted by ICE.
Detention
Mr. García-Sorto’s discharge paperwork from the hospital instructed him to take Zofran, for nausea, and oxycodone, for pain, every four to six hours over the next week. He said he received neither of these medications in detention, only ibuprofen.
The paperwork also said that he should schedule a follow-up appointment in a trauma clinic within 10 days for “continued treatment,” and that he should see a neurologist “as soon as possible.” Neither happened, he said.
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| Mr. García-Sorto said he tried to speak with his family whenever the tablets provided to detainees for video calls were available. Ms. Benítez recorded this call he made from detention earlier this year. Courtesy of Yanely Benítez |
In detention, Mr. García-Sorto kept to himself. He ate his meals, which he hated — they were mostly white bread with mortadella — and then went immediately back to his bed to lie down.
Whenever he could, he called his wife and children. He missed Christmas and his son’s fourth birthday.
He said that throughout this time, he was in serious pain. “I was dying in there, but I didn’t say anything to them,” he said.
The D.H.S. spokesperson disputed Mr. García-Sorto’s account of his treatment while in custody. The spokesperson said he received all prescribed medications and follow-up care, and that he “consistently reported feeling good.”
After nearly three months, he received a follow-up chest X-ray and saw a doctor, his medical records show. He said that he left the detention facility for the appointment, but that the physician examined him only briefly and told him he was doing fine. The only symptom noted on his medical record from this visit was rib pain.
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When he was first detained, his family scrambled to find a lawyer who could help get him out. But it wasn’t until mid-December that they finally found one in Dallas willing to take on his case.
Even though he was not criminally charged, Mr. García-Sorto had little recourse for remaining in the United States. At his final hearing in immigration court in March, he was ordered to be removed to Honduras.
Deported
In early April, Mr. García-Sorto boarded a flight to San Pedro Sula with nearly 300 other people, everyone shackled.
Ms. Benítez and their two children decided to leave the United States soon after. She sold Mr. García-Sorto’s car for a couple thousand dollars, packed two suitcases and left most of their belongings behind. She said she received $2,000 from the federal government for self-deporting and spent about $1,500 on the three plane tickets home.
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The days pass slowly in Gualcince, where the landscape is dotted with half-built remittance houses, their unfinished frames and open windows patie
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