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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot seven rounds into the vehicle of a New York father while his five-year-old son was in the car on the afternoon of Thursday, October 8. Oscar Belgal, a Dominican man, who had just picked up his son from school, was hit in the neck but survived the shooting.
He is currently being detained by ICE in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn after being discharged from the hospital Thursday night. His lawyers have reported that he still has a bullet lodged in his body more than 24 hours after being shot.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that they were conducting a “targeted enforcement operation,” calling Belgal a “criminal illegal alien.”
Local officials describe the incident differently. In a press conference, held by immigrant rights groups and officials a couple hours after the shooting, speakers described that disguised agents approached Belgal’s vehicle with their guns drawn. When Belgal started to move his vehicle forward at least one agent opened fire. Video emerged online of one of the agents carrying a large gun that reports say was a modified AR-15.
“They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces,” said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to press later that night.
“There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents.”
The mayor claimed that he attempted to negotiate with President Trump directly for the release of Belgal, but “those negotiations were unsuccessful.” He then described ICE as “vicious” and “cruel,” saying that ICE undermines public safety.
“This is an agency that must be abolished.”
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams said that federal officials would certainly try to justify the shooting by painting a narrative that makes Bengal seem like “the worst human being you ever heard of.” But he emphasized that what actually happened is that a father picking up his child was shot by a federal agency after school dismissal in a residential area.
Later that night, in a separate press conference with the mayor, New York City Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner Jessica Tisch announced that Oscar Belgal had been arrested in 2023. Hecklers and protesters then began disrupting the mayor and the police commissioner, accusing them of demonizing the victim and justifying ICE violence.
“Tisch and the NYPD are effectively running cover for the Trump administration” over the federal shooting of a Dominican father, said Andre Easton, candidate for New York’s 15th Congressional District, in a statement on Friday, October 9.
Easton called on the mayor to back up his call to abolish ICE with action. “He must fully enforce his own Executive Order 13 and kick every ICE agent out of our city.”
He also slammed Ritchie Torres, the current representative of NY-15, for only demanding an investigation into the shooting. Torres’ demands represent a “betrayal of the Bronx.”
The same politicians that built the deportation machine won’t dismantle it, he argued.
“We need a mass movement powerful enough to dismantle it and win full, equal, and permanent rights for all immigrants.”
Sparks of that very movement may already be breaking out in New York.
Hours after the shooting, hundreds of New Yorkers took to the streets and marched to the hospital where Belgal was being treated. They carried banners and placards reading “Abolish ICE” and “Full Rights for All Immigrants” and “Justice for Lorenzo, Joan, and All Victims of ICE Terror.”
The protests were met with force by the New York City Police Department, who attacked protesters with barricades, pushing and shoving several, including congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, and making a handful of arrests.
However, New Yorkers have continued pushing for ICE to leave the city, organizing protests on Friday and Saturday.
The shooting in New York is yet another in a series of ICE shootings across the United States, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine. Each of these cases has left families and communities traumatized and provoked eruptions in the movement against ICE violence.
Now in New York, demonstrators are elevating the pressure on their elected officials and making a distinction between mere demands for investigation and concrete action that ends ICE operations and takes steps toward abolition.
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Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a food delivery driver in North Austin, Texas, was shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents while he was making a delivery on Sunday, September 20. Garces Perez, who survived the shooting but is now partially paralyzed, says his car was rammed by a large black unmarked truck.
ICE claimed they attempted a traffic stop and that Garces Perez fled, but the DoorDash driver and his lawyers’ account contradict this report, saying after he tried to U-turn and pullover, ICE agents rammed his vehicle again, and then an agent got out and aimed his weapon through the passenger side of the car and shot Garces Perez in the back of his neck.
CBP revealed on Tuesday, September 22, that the officer that fired the shot was not wearing a body camera, despite the agency’s body-camera requirements.
After a few hours in the hospital, Garces Perez was transferred to ICE custody with the bullet still lodged in his back.
“I am not doing well due to the gunshot wound and I have not received the medical attention that I require,” he said through a translator at a press conference in Austin. After receiving no pain medication at the hospital, Garces Perez said that in ICE custody, he was forced to sleep on the floor and repeatedly asked for medical care while in severe pain.
His attorney also said he developed paralysis on his left side.
Within hours of the shooting, protests erupted in Austin. Hundreds of residents flooded the streets demanding ICE out of their neighborhoods.
Organizers have connected the shooting to a growing number of fatal and nonfatal encounters involving immigration agents, including the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island.
“We cannot be silent as ICE is shooting and killing our neighbors!” a statement by the Austin branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation said.
Protests have continued across Austin on Monday and Tuesday. Student walkouts were also seen on Tuesday, September 22, by students across Pflugerville, Texas, north of downtown Austin, as well as Navarro Early College High School.
After the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security quickly claimed that Garces Perez was an “illegal alien from Venezuela, who illegally entered” the United States.
Garces Perez’s lawyers have refuted these claims, saying he entered the country through CBP One, the US border processing system. “He had a work permit. He was seeking asylum.” They said that a notice of hearing was sent to an old address, despite Garces Perez updating his address with the immigration court. “He didn’t know he had a hearing. So he didn’t go and got a deportation order in absentia, which is a very common thing.”
According to reports, DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are leading an investigation into the ICE shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez.
Austin police and the Travis County district attorney’s office have also said they intend to investigate the shooting. But their investigations come amid strong criticism of federal officials’ handling of previous ICE shootings in Texas. In Houston, Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare has said federal officials did not provide his office with information about the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He is taking his own investigation to a grand jury to force the release of more details.
The Austin shooting follows a series of fatal encounters involving federal immigration agents this year, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine.
As federal agents continue to face scrutiny over deadly encounters in Texas and other states, Austin residents and organizers say they will continue protesting and organizing until ICE is out of their communities.
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