Seven shots fired amid crowds of passersby at the time children are leaving school. Residents gripped by terror. Citizens clash with police barricades erected around the ICE team
In Marble Hill, where upper Manhattan merges into the Bronx, an ICE team opened fire shortly after 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, at the very hour when classes end and sidewalks fill with children and parents walking them home. The agents acted as they know how: seven gunshots fired in the middle of the street. Then, the car comes to a stop and the man is arrested, sitting on the ground and bleeding, with a bullet lodged in his neck. In the back seat, his five-year-old son is crying desperately.
It remains unclear why the agents opened fire: the federal agents’ body-camera footage has not been made public. ICE claims that Belgal tried to run over the agents by accelerating toward their vehicles; some eyewitnesses dispute this account.
Once again, the incident appears to set the official version against the available images, with the use of firearms against a person at the center of the controversy. According to the accounts that have emerged so far, he was unarmed and had his five-year-old son in the car. The comparison is with the case of Renee Good, who was shot dead in cold blood in Minneapolis by an immigration agent while she was behind the wheel of her own car. At the time, federal agents also claimed that the woman had tried to run them over, despite footage appearing to show otherwise. Belgal is being accused of something similar.
How an Undocumented Immigrant Becomes an ICE “Priority Target”
Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old Dominican national, was serving a five-year probation sentence for aggravated robbery before the ICE team’s assault. He was also accused of trafficking cocaine and fentanyl, but the case was still pending, and he had pleaded not guilty.
At this stage, therefore, the only established prior conviction remains aggravated robbery. To justify the aggressive arrest, ICE has added alleged ties to the Trinitarios, a gang of Dominican origin, as well as possible information concerning an attempted murder of a federal agent in 2025, without clarifying the basis for these allegations. Belgal maintains his innocence.
The broad discretion granted to ICE concerns not only the criteria it uses to select its targets, but also the weight assigned to unproven allegations, the limits on the use of force during arrests, and the methods employed to carry them out. The men who surrounded Belgal’s car, with his five-year-old son inside, were armed and not wearing uniforms. It could have looked like an attack by ordinary criminals—one he needed to escape. Some agents were disguised as construction workers to avoid being recognized.
The fact that Belgal, confronted by two armed men in his car, tried to get to safety significantly undermines the justification the agents have offered for opening fire. How can the use of lethal force be invoked when the person being arrested has not even realized that you are a law enforcement officer and is fleeing to protect himself and his son? The agents, moreover, have sought to justify the brutal assault by acknowledging that they did not know the child was in the car.
Mamdani Condemns ICE, but His Base Demands Action
“ICE is rotten to the core.” Following the Marble Hill shooting, Zohran Mamdani launched a frontal attack on the federal agency, going so far as to call for its abolition. Washington responded harshly, defending the agents and accusing the mayor of fueling hostility toward them. But pressure is also coming from his own political base, which wants him to move from words to action: respect for civil rights, transparency about the operation, and accountability for the handling of the protests.
In the crosshairs is the Strategic Response Group (SRG), the NYPD unit accused by protesters of assaulting and charging at them while securing the perimeter of the federal ICE operation. This has renewed calls, already made on several occasions, to disband the SRG and remove Jessica Tisch, the commissioner in charge of public safety. Until now, Tisch’s continued leadership of the police department has been one of the cornerstones of the Mamdani administration’s internal balance, providing continuity in the management of public safety (violent crime in NYC is currently at a historic low, ed.).
The decision continues to draw criticism from socialist allies, who are demanding a cleaner break with repressive practices and with any form of cooperation that could facilitate ICE operations. Tisch has stated that “the NYPD did not participate in the federal operation before the shooting,” but the handling of the events that followed remains controversial, particularly the response to the protests and the protection afforded to the agents.
Sooner or later, Mamdani will have to choose. His ability to maintain an open channel to Trump and advance his affordability agenda is colliding with the demands of his most loyal voters, who want a decisive break with a Democratic establishment subservient to the Zionist lobby, which Tisch represents. The political risk is that compromise will ultimately erode the very trust of those who elected him to change the system.
Mamdani thus risks being remembered as yet another politician who rose to power by appealing to working people’s hopes, only to betray them: what political slang calls another sellout—“another turncoat like Obama or Bernie Sanders,” in the eyes of the most disillusioned observers.