A Democratic socialist congressional candidate claimed “it doesn’t even matter” that the illegal immigrant injured by ICE agents had a violent criminal history — and accused the New York Police Department of vilifying him.
DSA darling Darializa Avila Chevalier told left-wing streamer Hasan Piker that accused gangbanger Oscar Belgal was just being a good father when he tried to flee the feds with his 5-year-old son in the car in the Bronx on Thursday — and was somehow a victim of the revelation of his own criminal record.
“I was so angry,” Chevalier, a Democratic candidate for the 13th Congressional District, said of the illegal immigrant’s story as a reputed member of the Trinitarios street gang used against him.
“To me, it doesn’t even matter,” she told Piker, who agreed.
“Police Commissioner (Jessica) Tisch came and I understand it’s her role to provide more information,” she said. “But rather than condemn ICE, rather than condemn the shooting or the events that are taking place, she started vilifying Oscar.
“Put yourself in Oscar’s shoes,” she added. “You have your child in the back seat, you pick them up from school and all of a sudden you see masked men coming up to your car, banging on it, pulling out guns. You run. I’m sorry, you’re protecting your child,” she said.
“He must be released,” she said of Belgal, repeating a call from Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who suggested the threat was an ordinary “New Yorker.”
When asked for his parting words, Chevalier told Piker, “F–k ICE and abolish it.”
Belgal, 28, a reputed member of the Trinitarios street gang, picked up his son in the Marble Hill neighborhood on Thursday shortly after 4 p.m. when plainclothes ICE agents stormed his SUV and fired at the vehicle as he tried to drive away, wounding him in the neck.
Here’s the latest on the Bronx ICE shooting:
Authorities said Belgal entered the United States illegally in 2022 and racked up a chilling record, including a 2023 armed robbery conviction and a 2025 arrest for allegedly selling fentanyl, cocaine and heroin.
Tenants of Belgal’s former Washington Heights apartment building told the Post that he also terrorized his neighbors with a machete, with one resident calling him a “menace to society.”
However, Thursday’s shooting shook the Bronx neighborhood and sparked massive protests in the borough calling for federal immigration agents to leave the Big Apple.
Tisch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member, denounced the federal operation and said the NYPD was not involved or informed in advance of the ICE raid.
But Chevalier told Piker that Belgal, who is in a federal prison in Brooklyn, should be released as she redoubled her earlier call for Tisch’s resignation.
Stu Smith, an investigative analyst at the Manhattan Institute, disagrees.
“This is a fascinating glimpse of DSA-style co-governance in action, revealing both the growing tensions around (Mayor Zohran) Mamdani’s administration and the movement’s commitment to abolitionism,” he wrote on X.
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