NEW YORK — People were walking on the sidewalks, children had gotten out of school and the streets were filled with cars when two men in jeans and sweatshirts rushed toward a gray Honda with their guns drawn.
Moments later, gunfire pierced the air.
Pedestrians dove onto the sidewalk or ran, police video released Friday shows. A girl with a backpack covered her mouth with her hand. Moments later, an officer is seen carrying a terrified 5-year-old boy. A 28-year-old man was bleeding from the neck and rushed to a hospital.
The shooting of a Dominican man by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Thursday afternoon shocked residents in the Marble Hill neighborhood of New York City and sparked a fresh clash between city leaders and Trump administration officials over ICE’s tactics and presence in the city.
In a Friday morning news conference, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin cast the man, Oscar Belgal, as an aggressor with a long criminal record who used his car to ram two government vehicles and then accelerate toward officers. He said the ICE officer who fired did not know Belgal’s son was in the vehicle.
Mullin cast blamed on New York officials, whom he accused of “endangering the safety of the public” by failing to cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts to take custody of undocumented immigrants who are arrested for state and local offenses.
New York officials, meanwhile, denounced ICE officers for wielding their weapons against an unarmed man driving with a young child on a residential street. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) said the agency is “sowing chaos and terror” across the country, undermining public safety and should be abolished. Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) want ICE to pause enforcement operations in the state.
Mullin said there would be no pause in enforcement operations and that Belgal would face criminal prosecution.
“He knew he had a child in the car and chose to accelerate at a high-rate of speed,” Mullin said at a news conference in Washington, flanked by senior ICE officials. “He’s a criminal, a thug, a gangbanger. The outrage should be with him endangering a 5-year-old.”
A federal judge temporarily barred ICE on Friday from deporting Belgal, who was treated at a hospital and then transported to New Jersey. He was later returned to New York and being held at a detention center in Brooklyn, his lawyers said.
“Regardless of whether or not someone has a criminal history, it is not lawful and it is not okay to shoot a father in an afternoon with his son in the back seat,” said Harold Solis, Belgal’s lawyer. “That is not how we resolve legal disputes in this country. We resolve them in buildings like these.”
New York City has policies that limit local law enforcement from sharing certain information with federal officers or honoring detainer requests unless immigrants have been convicted of violent crimes. The state also has policies to prevent federal authorities from accessing motor vehicle and drivers’ license records of immigrants without a court order or search warrant.
Mullin said ICE had issued 14,766 detainers in New York since President Donald Trump took office last year to take custody of people in New York jails. But, he said, the state has not cooperated. “Silence is what we got from the state of New York,” he said.
Mullin said he spoke with Mamdani on Thursday night, and the mayor asked him to release Belgal, prompting Trump to tell Mamdani that the administration would transfer custody to local police if they are willing to pursue criminal charges against Belgal.
“The mayor said, ‘We are not detaining him,’” Mullin said.
Mamdani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Carmen Pedrosa, 39, said she was walking down Marble Hill Avenue when she saw Belgal talking on the phone, telling someone he was being followed. He was walking fast, talking loudly, with his son by his side. As men wearing plain clothes approached on foot, he jumped in his car with the boy, she said. Pedrosa said Belgal tried to flee and made a turn but did not appear to ram any ICE vehicles.
That’s when the officers began shooting, Pedrosa said in an interview.
“They shot the car in the front and then in the back. And then the kid was in the car — thank God the kid didn’t get shot or nothing like that,” she said, adding that Belgal’s SUV crashed, and the ICE officers removed him in a rough manner.
“He was not actually fighting,” she said. “They just dragged him, threw him on the floor. And he’s like, ‘I’m bleeding.’”
Video clips from bystanders show Belgal on the pavement with his hands cuffed and ICE officers nearby, including one in a yellow construction-worker-style vest holding a rifle. Some of the bystanders could be heard shouting angrily at the ICE officers.
Other video captured by NYPD cameras and released Friday showed the moments before and after the incident, but did not show the officer as he fired his gun toward Belgal’s vehicle.
Belgal was stopped in front of a fire hydrant when an ICE officer in plain clothes approached the driver’s side window with his gun drawn, according to residential police cameras. Another officer approached on the same side near his headlight. At that point, Belgal’s car moved forward and went out of the frame.
Later, police found seven shell casings.
Belgal’s car was found perpendicular to the road, with damage to the windshield and a shattered back window. A gray, four-door sedan owned by ICE had damage to its front left panel, and its lower panel was fully disconnected, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference Thursday.
On Friday, a federal judge held a hearing regarding a petition by Belgal’s lawyers demanding his release from ICE custody and alleging that the Trump administration violated his rights by arresting him without a warrant. (His attorneys referred to him as Oscar Bergal and acknowledged that his last name has been spelled several ways. In New York City court filings, his name is spelled Belgal.)
During the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Waterman was asked for the legal justification for Belgal’s arrest.
“I unfortunately don’t have a firm answer on this at this time,” Waterman responded. “It is a question that ICE is getting back to me on that. There is criminal history there.”
At a news conference afterward, Belgal’s lawyers said he told them he still had a bullet in his body.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have faced widespread public outrage over aggressive enforcement tactics. Federal officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens during a surge in operations in Minneapolis in January. Since July, two immigrants have been shot and killed by ICE officers who fired into their vehicles.
Trump officials have consistently stated that their goal is to keep Americans safe by targeting enforcement against “the worst of the worst” — undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes or repeated offenses. But arrest data shows that many of those being arrested have only civil immigration violations. More than half of all the people ICE arrested in July did not have a criminal record, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Tisch and Mamdani told reporters late Thursday that the ICE officers were not wearing clothing that indicated they were law enforcement personnel and said at least one officer was carrying a long gun.
“They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents,” Mamdani said. “School had just gotten out. The street was crowded with families and children.”
Mullin said the officers were conducting a standard undercover operation against Belgal, whom officers had unsuccessfully attempted to arrest in September before he fled.
ICE officers “identified themselves and gave lawful orders when they approached the vehicle,” Mullin said. “Not to mention he knew he was wanted. He had fled once. … I know he knew his day was coming.”
Mullin said authorities believe Belgal is connected to a gang that was involved in the shooting of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer last year.
“It’s shameful we’re giving this case so much attention when this was a thug — the worst of the worst,” Mullin said of Belgal.
Authorities said Belgal has lived in the United States for three years and been accused of crimes including grand larceny, robbery and theft armed with a dangerous weapon.
People who knew Belgal described him in interviews as having a turbulent life in the U.S., including getting into fights, selling drugs and mugging someone. Last year, his landlord went to court to seek payment of past-due rent from nearly a year, accusing him of a “toxic” living situation, court records show.
Others shared fonder memories. Maria Santana, 42, said Belgal lived in an apartment building in Upper Manhattan for several years but moved within the past year to the Bronx. Santana described Belgal as a “very nice guy” who cleaned up trash in front of the building, helped neighbors find parking spots and carried groceries for elderly residents.
“One time, some guy was going to fight me over a parking space, and he came down and said, ‘Hey that is a woman,’” Santana recalled. “He defended me, and he didn’t even know me.”
Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-New York) said he visited with Belgal’s 5-year-old son and his mother Thursday night. He said the family told him Belgal picked up his son from school, put him in a car seat in the back and then went to visit family members in the area when he was shot.
The child is physically unharmed, but Espaillat said the family told him he is “traumatized by this whole experience.”
The lawmaker said he was not aware of Belgal’s alleged criminal history, but that regardless, the decision to fire at his vehicle in the middle of the day in a residential area put many people at risk.
“Any neighborhood in the country will be appalled of this kind of stuff happening right in the middle of it,” Espaillat said. “If anything, they were the ones that put our community in danger.”
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