About a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement barred its officers from chasing drivers who refuse to stop, a federal immigration officer shot a Dominican man in the neck as he sat in a car with a 5‑year‑old boy in New York City on Thursday afternoon — a shooting that set off protests and sharp condemnation from the city’s mayor and other local officials, according to an Associated Press report published by PBS NewsHour.
The man, 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, survived and was treated at a hospital, according to the AP, which cited city police for his identity. The Department of Homeland Security said it had been trying to arrest him in a “targeted enforcement operation,” but offered few specifics, saying only that “during the incident, an ICE officer discharged his weapon” and that the man was injured.
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch gave a far more detailed account.
According to the AP, Tisch said Belgal was pulling into a parking space when a plainclothes federal officer approached with his gun drawn, followed by a second officer who was also not in uniform. Belgal began to pull the car forward, and then at least one officer fired seven rounds, striking him below the left ear. The 5-year-old was unharmed and was with a relative, Tisch said. City police were not part of the operation, she said, but heard the shots and responded.
The gunfire erupted around 4 p.m. in Marble Hill, a small slice of Manhattan attached to the Bronx, the AP reported. Tisch said an NYPD security camera captured some of the lead-up but not the shooting itself. The damaged car was left blocking the roadway, with a bullet entry point on the windshield and an exit hole in a rear window.
Pedro Almaraz, who works at a nearby restaurant, told the AP he heard several gunshots and saw a man on the ground surrounded by officers in face masks and vests marked with Department of Homeland Security branding, as witnesses screamed. Bystander video and photos showed a man seated on the ground with his hands behind his back in the immediate aftermath, and another clip showed NYPD officers carrying Belgal into a police vehicle.
City and state leaders responded immediately and furiously.
“There is no justification for what we have seen today,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said, according to the AP. The mayor, a Democrat, said the federal officers who surrounded the vehicle wore construction vests and masks, making them hard to identify as immigration officers. He said he spent two hours Thursday night pressing President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to release the wounded man and to halt immigration operations in the city — to no avail — and that federal authorities later removed Belgal from the hospital and took him away. Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, said she delivered a similar message to Trump and Mullin by phone.
The anger was personal for some. “We are heartbroken and enraged,” said City Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, a Democrat who emigrated from the Dominican Republic and represents the Marble Hill area, per the AP. Demonstrators at the scene chanted “ICE off our streets now!” and marched to the hospital, where a crowd blocked an intersection; as police set barricades, some protesters shoved the barriers and threw water bottles, and officers made some arrests.
DHS defended the operation and blamed local policy. The agency said its officers “are forced to make arrests at large in the community in unpredictable and dangerous environments” when people it called “dangerous illegal aliens” are released, and it faulted “reckless sanctuary policies” in Democratic-led areas, the AP reported. The term “sanctuary” has no fixed legal definition but generally refers to jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
The agency described Belgal as a “criminal illegal alien” with a grand larceny conviction and a record of other arrests.
According to Tisch, by way of the AP, Belgal was arrested on a robbery charge in 2023, later pleaded guilty to grand larceny and was sentenced to probation, and was more recently arrested on a drug-sale charge that has not been resolved; electronic court records show he pleaded not guilty in that case. Whatever his record, he was unarmed in the car when the shots were fired, according to the account police gave.
The shooting adds to a troubling run of violence tied to immigration stops. ICE agents have fired their weapons during more than a dozen vehicle stops since last year, killing at least four people and wounding others, the AP reported. In late September, the agency instructed officers not to engage in high-speed chases and to conduct vehicle stops only after completing specific training.
For residents, part of the alarm is simply not knowing who is pointing a gun. “We need to have better transparency to understand who we’re dealing with, because anybody in the street can just put on a vest and pull out a gun and claim to be ICE,” Marble Hill resident Alfred Silva told the AP, noting that one officer wore a construction safety vest. “I feel like regardless if you’re left or right, we should understand that this shouldn’t be happening.”
Source: Associated Press.
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