A federal judge has temporarily blocked the deportation of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, the illegal alien shot by an ICE agent in Austin earlier this month during a confrontation, according to his attorney. The order came down just ahead of his removal, which tells you how close this one got to the plane. Judge Orlando L. Garcia issued the block, and DHS is leading the investigation into the shooting.

You can read the original report here. Details are still thin, which is normal for these cases. The attorney announced the ruling; ICE hasn't put out its full account yet, and I'll believe the activist version of events about the time pigs fly. Wait for the investigation and whatever footage exists.

What we know so far: Garces Perez was in the country illegally and had a final deportation order. ICE agents moved to arrest him in Austin. There was a confrontation. An agent fired and hit him. He survived, his removal was set to proceed, and then a judge stepped in with a temporary order. Now he stays put while the courts sort out whatever his legal team is arguing this week.

I spent 26 years in the Border Patrol and I'll tell you what every agent already knows: a shooting turns a routine arrest into a six-month paperwork event. There's a review, there are lawyers, and a two-hour operation stretches into a legal saga. That's the system we've built. Agents work inside it and keep going.

A quick word on the jargon, because the press gets it wrong constantly. A "temporary block" like this is usually a stay of removal. It doesn't mean he wins his case. It means the deportation pauses while a judge looks at a specific claim, and stays expire. Sometimes they lead somewhere for the alien, most of the time they don't. The attorney announcing it like it's a Super Bowl victory tells you how low the bar has gotten for the other side. A delay counts as a win now.

Austin has been widely reported for years as a sanctuary city, with local officials declining to honor ICE detainers as a matter of stated policy. A detainer, for those new to this beat, is the request ICE sends to a jail asking them to hold someone for 48 hours so agents can come pick them up. When jails won't honor them, ICE has to go out and make street arrests, which are less controlled, less predictable, and more likely to end in exactly the kind of confrontation we're all reading about. Every council member who votes for noncooperation owns a piece of these incidents, and I'll keep saying so.

The part worth watching is what happens next. The temporary block holds, or it doesn't. If it's lifted, Garces Perez goes back in the queue and the count moves up by one. If it holds, we get months of filings. Either way, an illegal alien with a final removal order who was shot during a confrontation with ICE is still on American soil tonight, and a judge put him there.

The scoreboard for now: removal flights, one alien short. Federal court, working overtime. The count keeps moving regardless.