ICE Shoots Man in NYC While 5-Year-Old Was in Car

Around 4 p.m. yesterday, in the Marble Hill neighborhood in the Bronx, an ICE agent opened fire on a silver Honda Civic. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch says surveillance cameras caught two plainclothes federal agents walking up to the driver’s side as the car pulled into a parking space, one of them with his gun already drawn.

Then the car moved forward and out of the camera’s view, and investigators later determined that at least one agent fired seven rounds into it. Sitting in the backseat the whole time was a 5-year-old boy.

The driver was 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, a Dominican national and the boy’s father. DHS didn’t name him, but they were happy to rattle off a prior grand larceny conviction, multiple prior arrests for assault, robbery, drug possession, and weapons possession, and “associations” to the Trinitarios gang.

Commissioner Tisch laid out a slightly different picture, saying he pleaded guilty to fourth-degree grand larceny in a 2023 robbery case and got five years’ probation, with a drug sale case from 2025 still pending.

Take all of that however you want, but none of it is a reason to put a bullet in somebody on a residential street. And if we’re going to talk about who acts like a gang, I’d say a crew of men in plain clothes and masks (per Mayor Mamdani and witnesses) who roll up with guns drawn, shoot a guy, and whisk him away in an unmarked car has a pretty strong claim to the title.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said this morning that the agents didn’t know there was a child in the car. Then maybe they should have fucking checked first. Looking inside a vehicle before you start shooting at it is basic police stuff, the kind of thing that’s supposed to be drilled into every officer before they ever get a badge, and “we didn’t see him” is less an explanation than a confession.

It also ignores everybody else on that block. Residents told reporters a nearby school had just let out, a fruit vendor was working down the street, and a 76-year-old woman coming home from work had to dive for cover, so firing seven rounds in the middle of New York City put a whole lot of civilians in the line of fire for the sake of one arrest.

Here’s what really gets my goat about DHS’s response. Its initial statement said an officer “discharged his weapon,” that the “criminal illegal alien” was injured, that agents rendered aid, and that the whole thing is under investigation, before pivoting to a rant about “reckless Democrat sanctuary policies.”

Nowhere in there was a single word about the 5-year-old. We only got that acknowledgment after the mayor, the governor, and the police commissioner made the child impossible to ignore, and even then it came packaged as an excuse.

Mullin also claimed Belgal accelerated and rammed two other cars, which the agents feared for their lives, and that they identified themselves and gave lawful orders. Nobody has used the phrase yet, but that’s the “weaponized vehicle” playbook, the same one we’ve watched ICE run in Houston, in Minneapolis with Renee Good, and in too many other cases to keep listing. The NYPD footage stops the moment the car leaves the frame without the shooting itself being recorded. Mayor Mamdani says the agents were in construction vests and masks that made them impossible to identify as ICE, so we’re left taking DHS at its word again. Excuse me if I’m not in a hurry to do that.

Thankfully, the boy wasn’t physically hurt. His aunt, who lives on the block, took him in after the shooting, and his mother took him to a hospital to be evaluated, although witnesses said ICE agents took him from the scene, so accounts differ on exactly who had him in those first frantic minutes.

One neighbor said the boy was in shock and didn’t even cry, which tells you plenty about what a kid that age just lived through. God forbid one of those seven bullets had struck him. Beyond the obvious tragedy, last night’s protests would have been far more volatile than they already were. Residents at the scene pinned a masked agent against a wall until NYPD pulled him out, and more than 300 people later marched on the hospital, charged a row of cops, and trapped agents inside the building. That’s how heated it got with a child who walked away without a scratch.

And maybe, just maybe, people wouldn’t run from ICE if they weren’t being approached by masked agents who want to ship them off to what is essentially a concentration camp. Mullin pointed to Belgal fleeing agents back in September as if that proves something, but I’d say it proves how much people fear the alternative.

Belgal has since been moved out of New York to a “more secured facility,” so the father of a little boy who just heard his dad get shot is now somewhere out of state.

Seven rounds into a car with a kid in it, and the official position is that nobody could have known a kid was in there. Pathetic.

(Sources)