An ICE agent fired seven shots into a car in Upper Manhattan on Thursday afternoon, hitting the driver in the neck while his 5-year-old son sat in the back seat. The boy wasn’t hurt. The man, 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, survived and is now in federal custody.
It’s the first shooting involving ICE agents in New York City since President Trump’s immigration crackdown began, CNN reported. It happened just after 4 p.m. in Marble Hill, the small Manhattan neighborhood on the Bronx border, as kids were getting out of school.
What happened in the Marble Hill ICE shooting?
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said surveillance video shows a plainclothes federal officer walking up to the driver’s side of Belgal’s car with his gun drawn while another officer approached the front. The car then moved out of the camera’s view, so the video doesn’t show the shooting itself, Gothamist reported. Investigators determined at least one agent fired seven rounds.
Witnesses described panic. “The streets were full of children coming out of school,” one told ABC7. Another said, “He shot into the back of a vehicle without knowing that there was a 5-year-old child inside the car.” Police later found the boy safe with family.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the agents “wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents.” Two agents were also hurt and treated at a hospital; a federal official said one may have been injured in a car accident.
Who is Oscar Belgal?
The Department of Homeland Security called him a “criminal illegal alien” from the Dominican Republic with ties to the Trinitarios gang, a grand larceny conviction and prior arrests for assault, robbery, drugs and weapons. Tisch gave a narrower account: two New York City arrests, a 2023 robbery case in which he pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny and got five years’ probation, and a pending 2025 drug-sale case. DHS said agents gave him first aid right after the shooting.
How did New York officials respond?
Mamdani said he called Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to try to get Belgal released and to ask ICE to leave the scene, and “those negotiations were unsuccessful.” Instead, he said, ICE “put the man in an unmarked vehicle and whisked him away.””This is an agency that must be abolished,” the mayor said. Gov. Kathy Hochul said she told Trump and Mullin to halt ICE operations in New York and release any body camera footage.
About 200 protesters gathered near the scene Thursday night, and several people were arrested. The shooting came the same week ICE leadership told agents to arrest 1,000 more people a day, according to CNN’s sources.
The BeezLoop Take
Whatever Belgal’s record, nobody has explained why masked agents in construction vests needed to fire seven rounds into a car with a child in the back seat, on a crowded street at school dismissal. A grand larceny conviction and a pending drug case don’t justify that on their own, and federal authorities still haven’t explained what led up to the shooting.
This is what happens when you order agents to make 1,000 more arrests a day. Speed and quotas push officers toward risky confrontations in the middle of neighborhoods. If ICE is confident it did this right, it should release the body camera footage now, as the governor asked.
The open question: will anyone outside DHS get to investigate this shooting?
Also on BeezLoop: a Trump-appointed judge says ICE agents lied under oath and faked records, and only 27% of Latino voters approve of Trump in a new poll.
Sources: CNN · ABC7 New York · Gothamist · CBS News New York · ABC7 New York (video)
