Police turned him over to ICE. He died in a hail of bullets.

DALLAS − Stephany Gauffeny hovered over her comatose husband as he lay in bed at Parkland Medical Center, pleading with him to wake up but facing a yawning dread that he may never do so.

Staples closed a scar across his head, tubes snaked down his throat, and his face was swollen nearly beyond recognition. Each arm was attached to the bed railing with soft restraints and his ankles were shackled together. Nearby, a life support machine whooshed and beeped steadily.

Just a few weeks earlier, Miguel Angel Garcia Medina, 31, had been cavorting with his four children at their home in Arlington, Texas, meeting his 8-year-old daughter for lunch at school and giddily planning the arrival of their fifth child.

Now, on Sept. 24, he was in a hospital bed in a coma, his body ripped apart by rounds from a bolt-action rifle.

In a corner of the room, two agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement observed Gauffeny’s every move – a pair of constant reminders of how Garcia, who had crossed into the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor two decades earlier and had grown into a house painter, husband and father, had ended up near death in a hospital.

Under the close watch of the agents, she sat and talked to him and urged him to wake up.

“I would tell him: ‘Take your time. I’m going to wait for you as long as it takes,’” Gauffeny, 32, told USA TODAY. “’I’m going to be here every day taking care of you.’”

Garcia was one of several detainees ICE picked up for deportation under agreements with local police and held inside transport vans parked outside a Dallas ICE facility on the morning of Sept. 24 when a gunman opened fire, unleashing rounds from an 8mm bolt-action rifle. Authorities said the shooter, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, was targeting ICE agents. He was found dead at the scene of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Norland Guzman Fuentes, 37, of El Salvador was killed in the attack, and Venezuelan detainee Jose Andres Bordones-Molina was also injured in the shooting, treated for his injuries and later transferred to a detention center. No federal agents were hurt.

In a series of news conferences after the shooting, federal officials detailed how Jahn allegedly had left a series of handwritten notes denouncing ICE. They also heralded agents from ICE and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who reportedly tried to save the detainees during the barrage of gunfire.

But family members of the detainees and immigrant advocates bristled at how little detail was released about the shooting itself or the injured detainees and the circumstances that put them inside the transport van and in the crosshairs of a determined gunman.

In response to USA TODAY's request for comment, DHS sent an email that said: “Like other law enforcement agencies, it is standard procedure for detainees in ICE custody to have guards at the hospital.”

The agency did not respond to questions about the ongoing investigation.

The shooting also raised questions over controversial pacts between local law enforcement agencies and ICE – known as 287(g) agreements – in which undocumented immigrants are handed over to federal agents, even if charged with nonviolent offenses or whether or not they’ve applied for legal status. The detainees involved in the attack had been transferred from Tarrant County Jail to ICE custody just before the shooting.

Devan Allen, a former Tarrant County commissioner who opposed 287(g) agreements, said she was told the agreement was supposed to target only violent crime offenders. Suspects like Garcia should not have been ensnared in the program, she said.

“That breaks my heart,” Allen said. “That does not feel like justice for anybody.”

Immigrant advocates and families of the detainees said not enough has been said about those injured and killed in the attack.

“We do feel bad for (ICE agents)” who are targeted, said Rocio Martinez, a Fort Worth immigration attorney who represented Gauffeny and Garcia. “But they weren’t the people who were shot. The people who were shot deserve to be remembered for who they were and not just for the fact that they were here unlawfully or in ICE custody. They’re more than that.”

‘Just the best dad’

Garcia arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2007 as a 13-year-old unaccompanied minor, entering without a visa. He had fled violence in his hometown of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and went to live with his mother, Maria Garcia, who had migrated to Arlington a few years earlier.

He met Gauffeny while the two attended Sam Houston High School, reconnected after high school and got married on his birthday: Jan. 5, 2016.

Gauffeny had two daughters, Barbie and Kendra, from a previous relationship, and Garcia coddled and raised them as if they were his own, she said. They also had two kids of their own: Makayla and Miguel Angel Jr., whom he nicknamed “Cricket,” after the mischievous character from the animated series “Big City Greens.”

Last year, Gauffeny found out she was pregnant with a fifth child: another boy, whom they planned to name Miles. In May, they moved into a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home in Arlington to accommodate their growing family.

“It wasn't the biggest house, but we were really happy for that accomplishment,” Gauffeny said. “We worked hard for it.”

Garcia, a house painter, would get home exhausted and paint-splattered but always made time to tuck the little ones in, Gauffeny said. In the morning, he was the one driving everyone to school. Anytime the paletero would push his cart filled with popsicles past the home, she said, Garcia would get all the kids treats.

Makayla, 8, was the first one squealing, “Papi!” when Garcia walked through the door and solicited a few extra hugs from her father.

“He was always hugging, very affectionate,” Gauffeny said. “Just the best dad.”

But Garcia’s undocumented status hung over them like a cloud. Gauffeny, who is a U.S. citizen, applied for an I-130 visa a few years ago, the first step in getting Garcia legal residency. It was preliminarily approved, but Garcia still needed permission to leave the country and finalize the visa at the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

He planned to travel there later in 2025.

Then, on Aug. 8, Garcia was FaceTiming with his mother, brother and stepfather, who had been swept up in ICE raids a few weeks earlier and deported to Mexico. He grew sullen, Gauffeny said, playing bachata music and telling his mother he missed her. He drank a beer. Then another one.

Gauffeny fell asleep and awoke at 2 a.m. to a phone call from another one of Garcia’s brothers who lived 10 minutes away. He told her Arlington police pulled Garcia over as he drove to the brother’s home and arrested him on suspicion of driving while intoxicated and evading arrest. He hadn’t crashed into anything and no one was hurt, his brother told Gauffeny. Garcia was later transferred to Tarrant County Jail.

“His whole family – his mom, his stepdad, his brother – getting deported really affected him,” she said. “He was depressed. I just didn’t know how to help him.”

Gauffeny said she realized Garcia was in trouble and at risk of being deported, even though it was his first DWI offense. She had heard of other migrants arrested in Tarrant County who were handed over to ICE and deported. Under President Donald Trump, that cooperation – known as a 287(g) agreement – had flourished.

Controversial pacts spread across USA

Named for Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the statute empowers local law enforcement agencies to perform certain federal immigration functions, including holding people in local jails until ICE takes custody.

In December 2024, there were 135 such agreements in 16 states across the USA. By mid-November, that number had soared to 1,154 agreements across 40 states, even with college police on campuses like Florida International University and Florida Atlantic University, as the Trump administration used it as a tool to crack down on undocumented immigrants.

Though designed to target immigrants who had committed violent crimes or pose a national security threat, today the agreements are used to sweep up anyone who is in the country illegally, said Lena Graber, managing attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

“It's part of the mass detention and mass deportation machine,” she said. “And (DHS) conscripts more agencies to do that for them.”

Sheriffs and police chiefs across the country herald the agreements as ways to clear their streets of dangerous migrants who shouldn’t be in the United States in the first place.

But enlisting local law enforcement agents to identify undocumented immigrants has, in the past, led to racial profiling and the removal of suspects who were charged with – but not convicted of – crimes, Graber said.

“There are a lot of people who are charged with crimes and might be worth a chance at redemption,” she said, “and instead they are hurled out of the country and their family is left to fend for itself.”

When Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn introduced a 287(g) agreement to his county in 2017, it uncorked a wave of controversy, with residents split on how they felt about the agreements.

Measure to hand over immigrants roils Tarrant County

In June 2020, the four county commissioners met to decide whether to allow the agreement to continue without an annual review, essentially making it permanent. Dozens of residents – many of them opposing the measure – packed the small Tarrant County chambers in Fort Worth. Extra security lined inside and outside the chambers. Demonstrators rallied outside. Inside, several people opposing the measure were forcibly removed when they got too rowdy.

Waybourn didn’t answer several requests for comment. Current county judge Tim O’Hare declined interview requests.

“The tension was palpable,” Allen, the county commissioner, said of the June 2020 meeting. “My concern was racial profiling. My concern was about its efficacy. My concern was about its implementation. My concern was about the lack of accountability by the sheriff's department.”

Commissioners deadlocked on the question 2-2. The deciding vote came down to then-County Judge Glen Whitley, who said he supported getting criminal migrants off Tarrant County streets but also felt lawful migrants should have a clearer path to citizenship.

Assured the agreements would go after the “worst of the worst,” he supported the measure, and 287(g) agreements became entrenched in the county by a final vote of 3-2.

Whitley said he has since grown disillusioned with how the agreements are being used, particularly during Trump’s second term, when federal enforcement agents use every tool to detain and remove as many undocumented immigrants as possible.

“President Trump indicated that he was only going to take the worst of the worst,” Whitley told USA TODAY. “But in an effort to get to his numbers, he's taking anybody he can find, and I think, in many instances, picking up people who have tried to be good community representatives, who tried to work hard to take care of their family.

“To that end, I'm very disappointed.”

‘We had a plan’

Gauffeny was keenly aware that Tarrant County Jail officials would hand over her husband to ICE agents as soon as he stepped out of jail. Together with attorney Raul Natera, they decided not to bond him out until all of his local charges had been resolved, giving an immigration judge less reason to deport him.

Garcia had two other items on his record – he had been cited in 2011 and again in 2017 for “failure to identify/giving false/fictitious information,” both misdemeanors – but this was his first DWI, a Class B misdemeanor. The charge of evading arrest was dismissed.

Garcia would stay at the Tarrant County Jail until the DWI was taken care of for time served, then seek release from ICE detention by showing he had diligently applied for an I-130 visa. If that failed, they’d request a “cancellation of removal,” showing he was married to a U.S. citizen, had been in the country for more than 10 years and was the main provider to his four – almost five – children.

Even if he was deported, he could make his way to Ciudad Juarez and apply for the I-130 visa from there, Gauffeny said.

“We had a plan,” she said. “Eventually, either way, he would be able to be here legally.”

Garcia spent day after day in Tarrant County Jail. He would call Gauffeny several times a day, every day. At night, he’d talk to his kids, telling the younger ones he was away for work.

Garcia told Gauffeny he was sorry for driving that night, that he knew he had jeopardized everything they’d worked for, and reminded her to lock all the doors at night. Gauffeny assured him he’d be home soon.

‘He was just so happy’

His court date arrived on Sept. 23, 46 days after his initial arrest. Gauffeny sat in the visitor’s gallery and watched how defendant after defendant, accused of crimes she considered worse than her husband’s – burglary, assault, drug possession – were allowed to walk free.

A judge told Garcia that the evading arrest charge had been dismissed and that he had served enough time to satisfy the DWI charge, but that he was being kept in custody to hand him over to ICE. Garcia said he understood.

After the hearing, Gauffeny was allowed a few minutes to briefly chat with her husband. Garcia smiled and teased her about her growing belly, the pregnancy now in its final month. Gauffeny told him he looked skinnier. Overall, they were glad he was leaving county jail.

“He was just so happy,” Gauffeny said. “He was ready to get out of there.”

Later that night, Garcia called again, at around 9 p.m. He told Gauffeny that it was nice seeing her that day and that he would call her the next morning. If she hadn’t heard from him by 11 a.m., he said, it meant he’d been transferred to ICE detention and he’d try to call her when he could.

Before he hung up, 3-year-old Miguel Angel Jr. jumped on the line.

“Hi Papi! What are you doing?”

Garcia said he was at work but he missed him and would see him soon.

‘Yelling, screaming for help’

The next morning, as she prepared to shuttle the kids to school, Gauffeny noticed alarming alerts pop up on her Facebook feed: A gunman had shot up the ICE processing facility in Dallas earlier that morning and three detainees had been injured, including one who had died.

Authorities said Jahn, of Fairview, Texas, climbed onto the roof of a nearby office building and, at around 6:30 a.m., opened fire on the federal facility, spraying the building and hitting several transport vans filled with detainees parked outside.

An 18-year-old detainee who sat next to Garcia on the bus later told Gauffeny that her husband had been talking about her and the children that morning as they waited in the van.

Then, shots.

Guzman, sitting nearby, was shot and killed instantly, the detainee told Gauffeny. Garcia, riddled with bullets, draped over the detainee to prevent him from getting shot, he said. As they huddled down, shots still pinging the bus, a number of other detainees tried to escape out the van’s back door but it was locked, he told Gauffeny. Others yelled at the driver to drive away, but the bus remained stationary as rounds rained down on them.

“They were yelling, screaming for help,” Gauffeny recalled the detainee telling her. “They were just panicking in there and yelling the whole time they were being shot at.”

Some did escape the bus. In a surveillance video of the facility released to local media, detainees could be seen shackled and scampering into a building. A uniformed man who appears to be an employee points them to safety.

Federal officials have said ICE agents rushed in to help the shooting victims, but the detainee who spoke with Guzman said they were left alone during the fusillade. Gauffeny and her attorney, Martinez, would not identify the detainee or his family for fear they’d be targeted and deported.

ICE authorities did not respond to a list of detailed questions seeking to verify the detainee’s account.

Gauffeny followed news of the shooting on the TV news, but federal officials weren’t releasing names of the detainees.

At 11 a.m., as her phone remained silent, Gauffeny’s concern began to fester.

Two and a half hours later, just past 1:30 p.m., an ICE official called: Garcia had been wounded in the shooting and was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Gauffeny, her mother and her sister rushed to the hospital.

The official told Gauffeny that Garcia had to be revived with CPR and needed emergency surgery. But nothing prepared her for what she saw in the room on the hospital’s 15th floor: Her husband was scarred, stapled and intubated. His face was so swollen she could barely make out his features. Dried blood splattered his neck. And his arms and legs were restrained. She broke into sobs.

“It was just awful to see him like that,” she said. “It was traumatic.”

‘Eyes on you at all times’

Doctors initially told Gauffeny they were hopeful. When they gave him a pharyngeal reflex, where doctors stimulate the back of his throat, Garcia gagged, a positive sign. At times his shoulders would twitch and the swelling in his brain, caused by the wound to his neck, seemed to be lessening, they told her, according to Gauffeny.

Gauffeny was there every day, whispering to her husband about the media coverage he had drawn and the outpouring of support from family and strangers.

“Everyone's rooting for you,” she told him. “There's so many people that don't even know us that are praying for you.”

There was something else Gauffeny needed to contend with: ICE. Technically, Garcia was still in ICE custody. Each day, two ICE agents sat in his hospital room, observing them, she said.

Only Gauffeny, her mother and her sister were allowed inside the room, and visiting hours were limited to three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, even though the hospital allowed for longer visits, Gauffeny said.

Two new agents arrived each day.

“It felt weird because there are just eyes on you at all times,” Gauffeny said. “We didn’t have a lot of privacy.”

An ICE spokesperson said it is "standard procedure for detainees in ICE custody to have guards at the hospital.”

By the third day, Garcia’s condition spiraled. The swelling in his brain had resumed and his blood pressure plummeted. On the night of Sept. 27, he had to be revived after his heart nearly stopped. Doctors told Gauffeny that Garcia’s heart could give out at any moment. He wasn’t going to make it. They should make plans to say their goodbyes.

Garcia’s mother and brother got special permission to return to the United States to see him. Gauffeny also needed ICE approval to bring everyone into the room. After a few phone calls, the agency approved.

Just past 10 p.m. on Sept. 29, Garcia’s wife, two stepdaughters, mother, mother-in-law and brother crowded into the room to say their farewells. As the life support machine beeped steadily, his mother, Maria Garcia, prayed over her son and told him she loved him.

“Go in peace,” she told him. “If you have to go, go in peace.”

His two stepdaughters, Barbie and Kendra, thanked him for taking care of them all these years and promised to take care of Makayla and Miguel Angel Jr.

“We’re going to look after them for you,” they told him. “Don’t worry about them.”

After a while, a nurse came into the room and disconnected Garcia from the life support machine. Gauffeny held her husband’s hand as he breathed on his own for a few more minutes, then stopped.

He was pronounced dead at 10:48 p.m.

Having a baby while planning a funeral

Three days later, on Oct. 2, Gauffeny was at Arlington Memorial Hospital giving birth to Miles. As she cradled her newborn in her arm, she took calls from the funeral home, picking out casket colors and flower arrangements for her husband’s funeral.

Again, she had to call ICE to confirm she could retrieve her husband’s body. An ICE official explained that she was now in full custody of her husband – a stark reversal from the layers of bureaucracy and rules they faced when he was alive.

“That made me upset,” she said. “I don't get him until he passes away, then they’re like, ‘Here you go, here’s his body.’”

Garcia was buried on Oct. 9, in Arlington. The ceremony was well attended by family members and friends who knew him from Arlington.

Gauffeny struggled with how to relay the news to Miguel Angel Jr.

“You know how Jesus is in the sky?” she asked him one day shortly after Garcia’s death. “Well, Papi’s in the sky, too.”

“No!” he answered. “I don’t want Papi to be in the sky!”

Makayla also struggled with the news. She would clamp up and squeeze her eyes against tears that nonetheless streamed down her face, Gauffeny said.

Gauffeny wrestled with her own gnawing questions: Should she have bailed him out of Tarrant County Jail sooner, saving him from being in the transport van that morning? If she had stayed awake the night of his arrest, could she have kept him from leaving the house?

She also had questions about the shooting: How many total shots were fired? What were Garcia’s final words? How long was he bleeding on the bus before help arrived? ICE officials had been frustratingly quiet on the details, she said.

“I wonder if he was aware of what was happening,” Gauffeny said. “I wonder if he had any last words. I wonder if he was in pain and I wonder what his last moments were like.”

Gauffeny said she now worries how to support five children with the family’s main breadwinner gone. A GoFundMe page started by her sister has helped offset some of the hospital bills and funeral costs. But mortgage and other bills loom, and she suspects the family will need to see a therapist soon.

More painful are the constant reminders scattered throughout the home: Garcia’s tools in the garage, his clothes hanging in the closet, his toothbrush still in a cup by the bathroom sink.

“My brain knows he's gone,” Gauffeny said. “But I sometimes feel like he's just in the other room or laying down or somewhere at work and he'll be back later.”

A Dia de los Muertos offering

On Nov. 2, Gauffeny decided to take her children to Garcia’s grave for Dia de los Muertos, a holiday observed in Mexico and some parts of Latin America. The day is dedicated to paying respects to loved ones who have died. The family hadn’t ever observed the day, but Gauffeny thought it might help bring closure.

They brought fresh flowers, brushed off weeds and debris from his site and laid down a framed picture of a smiling Garcia. Miguel Angel Jr. saw it and asked his mom, “Is Papi dead?” He asked matter-of-factly. Gauffeny, caught off guard, changed the subject.

They prayed, lit a few candles and gathered to leave.

As they were walking away, Makayla jogged back to her father’s grave and placed a single Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, still in its wrapper from her Halloween collection, next to Garcia’s framed photo.

“Bye, Papi,” she said. “I love you.”

She ran to catch up to her family.

Jervis is a national correspondent based in Austin. Follow him on X: @MrRJervis.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated with the Department of Homeland Security response.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Police turned him over to ICE. He died in a hail of bullets.

Reporting by Rick Jervis, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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