On Thursday, October 8, an ICE officer in plain clothes approached a car in Marble Hill, Manhattan, with his gun drawn and, when the driver began to pull forward, fired seven rounds, according to the NYPD. The driver, 28-year-old Dominican national Oscar Belgal, was hit in the neck; his 5-year-old son was in the back seat and was not hurt. The site’s first report has the full account of that afternoon. Since then, New York has had three nights of protests, a federal court order blocking Belgal’s deportation, and a new account from ICE that puts the blame on him. The crowds have grown each day: a few hundred outside the hospital Thursday night, thousands in Foley Square on Friday, hundreds more in Herald Square on Saturday. Five people have been arrested, all on the first night.
The weekend’s two substantive developments cut in opposite directions. On Friday, U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken barred the government from deporting Belgal and from moving him outside New York or New Jersey while his lawyers challenge his detention. The same day, ICE’s top enforcement official gave the agency’s first detailed account of the shooting and blamed Belgal for it.
Three Nights of Protest, From Allen Hospital to Herald Square
Thursday, October 8. Within an hour of the shooting, residents of Marble Hill, a largely Dominican neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan, were in the street on West 225th. They marched to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where Belgal had been taken, and blocked the intersection at the entrance. When the NYPD put up barricades to keep the ambulance lane open, some demonstrators shoved them and threw water bottles. Police arrested five people for obstructing governmental administration. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for the 13th congressional district, said she was knocked to the ground and accused the NYPD of escalating. Around 11 p.m., while Mayor Zohran Mamdani was still on the phone with the White House asking for Belgal’s release, ICE drove him out of the hospital in unmarked vehicles.
Friday, October 9. Hands Off NYC, a coalition of more than 250 community groups, unions and congregations, brought thousands to Foley Square, outside the federal courthouse where Belgal’s lawyers were filing. Comptroller Mark Levine, congressional candidate Brad Lander and Assemblymember Jordan Wright spoke, along with Columbia students who walked down from campus. Lander said New Yorkers are sick of ICE abducting, detaining, deporting and now shooting their neighbors. A separate rally in Marble Hill that evening, with Representative Adriano Espaillat, Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson and Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, demanded that ICE leave the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, that the agent who fired be prosecuted, and that local businesses stop letting ICE stage operations on their property.
Saturday, October 10. Hundreds gathered in Herald Square and marched through Midtown calling for ICE to leave the city.
Judge Bars Deportation and Any Transfer Out of the Region
Belgal’s lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition in Manhattan federal court on Friday morning saying they could not find him. Judge Oetken issued a two-page order the same day. The government may not remove Belgal from the United States while the petition is pending, and may not transfer him to any facility outside the federal court districts covering New York City, Long Island, the lower Hudson Valley and New Jersey.
By then ICE had already moved him. A federal prosecutor told the court Belgal had been taken to ICE custody in Newark and was booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn on Friday, which satisfies the order. His lawyers said he remains in pain and still has a bullet in his body; the injury has also been described as an apparent graze wound below the left ear. The habeas case will now decide whether his detention is lawful, and it is the venue where the government’s account of the shooting will be tested under oath for the first time.
The order does not free him, does not end the immigration case, and does not stop ICE from pursuing the criminal charges it says are coming.
ICE Says He Rammed Agents. NYPD Says He Was Parking
On Friday, Marcos Charles, ICE’s executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations, gave a version that differs sharply from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s, at a news conference reported by ABC News. Officers had an ICE detainer for Belgal and used their vehicles to block his car. He refused orders to get out, weaponized the vehicle, smashed into ICE cars and tried to flee. The officers, Charles said, used their training and fired because they believed their lives, their partners’ lives and the public’s were in danger. He said the agents did not know a child was in the car, that Belgal did and chose to put the boy at risk, and that the government would seek criminal charges against him. DHS separately said Belgal has ties to the Trinitarios gang; it did not elaborate.
The footage released so far does not settle it. NYPD body camera video shows the aftermath: Belgal on the ground in handcuffs, an agent in a yellow construction vest, bystanders shouting. Surveillance video from a building camera, obtained by ABC News and described by NPR, shows agents approaching the car and the car speeding off. The NYPD’s own camera caught the lead-up but not the shots. No video yet public shows the moment of firing or whether the car struck anyone.
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said her office is working to establish the facts and decide its next course of action, which keeps open the possibility of a state investigation of the officer. Governor Kathy Hochul has asked DHS to release body camera footage from its own agents; it has not.
The shooting came days after ICE set a nationwide target of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 2,000, according to ABC News. Federal officials say it is a target, not a quota.
What the Weekend Changed for New Yorkers Facing ICE
The court order is the weekend’s one concrete result, and it exists because lawyers filed within 18 hours of the shooting. For anyone detained in a New York operation, the lesson is the speed: a habeas petition filed before a transfer is what keeps a person within reach of local counsel and local courts.
The protests have not changed federal policy. ICE has not paused operations in the city and has not identified the officer. The one institution with any purchase on the officer’s conduct is the Bronx district attorney.
For residents of Marble Hill, Inwood and the Bronx, the operational facts are the ones De La Rosa and Espaillat described: ICE activity in the area has risen sharply, agents work in plain clothes from unmarked cars, and the moment of contact is the dangerous one. On that point the NYPD and ICE accounts agree: officers approached a car with weapons drawn, and the car moved.