A federal agent shot a man in front of his five-year-old son, and the city’s attempt to negotiate his release with Washington failed.
NEW YORK, New York (Mamdani Post) – Federal immigration agents shot a 28-year-old man in the neck in a Manhattan-Bronx border neighborhood with his five-year-old son in the car, and the mayor’s attempt to win the man’s release from the White House ended without an answer.
What happened on a Thursday afternoon in Marble Hill
The shooting took place at about 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, according to syndicated coverage of the mayor’s late-night press conference. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot Oscar Belgal, who is from the Dominican Republic, during an attempted arrest. The NYPD said at least one agent fired seven rounds. Belgal arrived at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in stable condition, and his son, believed to be in the back seat, was unharmed.
Before Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke to reporters at about 11:20 p.m., unmarked ICE vehicles had already removed Belgal from the hospital. That detail deserves attention. A man who had been shot was moved out of a city hospital by the same agency that shot him, before the elected leader of the city had finished describing the event.
Two accounts of the arrest
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said the NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation before the shooting, and she described camera footage showing Belgal backing into a parking spot as a plainclothes agent approached with a gun drawn. The Department of Homeland Security said Belgal was being arrested and has ties to the Trinitarios gang; the syndicated report notes those are DHS claims, not established facts.
The head of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, Marcos Charles, offered a different version, quoted in The Nation’s account of the shooting: Belgal “weaponized his vehicle and proceeded to accelerate toward other officers.” This is a federal agency describing its own agent’s use of deadly force, with no independent review yet in the public record. Until video, dispatch records and ballistic evidence are examined by someone outside the agency, the public should treat both versions with caution, and should ask why a plainclothes arrest on a residential block ended with seven rounds fired near a child.
The mayor’s call to the White House
Mamdani called the shooting an outrage, said ICE is “rotten to its core,” and said the agency must be abolished. He also said he had spoken with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to seek Belgal’s release. The Nation reports that the conversation lasted two hours and that it did not secure his release; Mamdani has now met Trump three times since the election, and Trump visited Gracie Mansion on September 21.
Mullin gave the administration’s side in the days after. He said Trump had offered to hand Belgal to the NYPD, but that Mamdani wanted ICE to walk away entirely, and he argued that ICE officers are enforcing laws the mayor refuses to enforce. On October 9, Mullin said there would be no pause in enforcement in New York. Fairly stated, the federal position is that immigration law is federal and that sanctuary rules do not bind its agents. The city’s position is that local police and city property will not be used to help.
Protests, police and the question of cooperation
The shooting set off protests that night, and they collided with the NYPD. The Intercept’s report from the scene says officers pushed demonstrators back and that Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for Congress in the area, was knocked to the ground. The NYPD said it arrested five people and issued summonses to appear, and that the Strategic Response Group was not deployed that Thursday. An NYPD spokesperson said the department “does not conduct civil immigration enforcement.”
The mayor’s office said it would review the shooting, the police response to the protests, and ICE’s practice of staging in private parking lots. That review is the right place to start, and it should be public. Residents deserve to know whether officers who stood between neighbors and federal agents were protecting the city’s sanctuary rules or, in effect, protecting the agents.
What a serious response looks like
Abolishing ICE is a national fight that Mamdani cannot win from Gracie Mansion. But the city has levers. It can insist on an independent investigation of the shooting rather than an internal federal one. It can publish the footage in its possession once evidence is preserved. It can make clear in writing, and enforce, that NYPD officers will not manage crowds, perimeters or traffic to help federal arrests. And it can keep the legal and community defense resources for immigrant neighborhoods funded in the budget, at a time when the Trump administration has promised no relief.
There is also a class dimension that the coverage tends to skip. Immigration raids fall hardest on workers in low-wage industries, the home health aides, delivery workers, restaurant staff and day laborers whose labor underpins the city economy and who are least able to afford a lawyer. A city that depends on their work owes them protection, and a labor movement that takes solidarity seriously has to treat each raid as an attack on the whole working class.
Readers looking for a break from the grim news can find lighter commentary on City Hall at Bohiney Magazine, but nothing about this story is funny.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/