ICE agents looked more like ‘mass shooters’ than law enforcement in NYC shooting: Mamdani

Mayor Mamdani on Sunday compared videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shooting a man in a car with his 5-year-old boy in the backseat last week to recordings of mass shootings in a scathing rebuke of the controversial federal officers he wants out of New York City.

“It’s like you’re almost looking at a mass shooter instead of seeing someone who’s supposed to represent a federal agency,” Mamdani said in an interview on MS Now. “What you saw in that video and in the videos that have been released since then were people, people walking by, outside, not even knowing what they were seeing.

“There’s a reason why law enforcement officers are supposed to wear identifiable information and uniforms,” Mamdani told MS Now’s Jacob Soboroff.

An ICE agent fired seven rounds at a silver Honda Civic driven by Oscar Belgal, 28, on Marble Hill Ave. near W. 225th St. Thursday afternoon, hitting him in the neck. Her 5-year-old son was in the backseat when the bullets struck Belgal’s car.

Although video of the shooting has not been released, officers were in plain clothes, some disguised as construction workers, when they ran toward Belgal’s car, their guns raised on the undocumented immigrant.

Mamdani said he spoke to President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin over two hours of phone calls, and said Mullin had no problem with the way ICE agents acted.

“I implored both of them (to watch) the footage,” Mamdani said. “You’re talking about officers opening fire in broad daylight. Again, we’re talking about a Thursday around 4 p.m. We’re talking about people carrying their shopping bags, walking past a bodega, thinking they’re going home. Then they hear gunshots ringing out, and they don’t even know if it’s coming from someone who’s supposed to be a law enforcement officer or just someone terrorizing the city.

“When it comes to ICE, there is no difference between those two things,” he added sternly.

Belgal, who is also identified as Oscar Bergal in some court filings, still had a bullet in his neck as he sat in a cell at Brooklyn’s MDC federal prison, which has been used to house ICE detainees since last year.

Belgal’s lawyers said Sunday that their client was being held in “deplorable” conditions and had not received any food since Thursday.

“While he is currently in solitary confinement, a bullet remains lodged in his neck, the left side of his face is numb, and he can barely hear out of his left ear. Doctors told him that he urgently needed surgery, but that the procedure was too dangerous to be performed Thursday evening without the presence of a specialist surgeon,” his attorneys from the Legal Aid Society and Make the Road New York said. “Rather than receiving the urgent medical attention, care and compassion he desperately needs, Mr. Belgal says he has been confined to a solitary confinement cell, where he is forced to relive the terrifying moments when he was shot. He says he has not eaten a single meal since Thursday and has been told the only water available to him comes from a bathroom sink.”

U.S. Judge Paul Oetken barred the federal government from removing Belgal from the country absent a decision from him and said he must remain in New York or New Jersey.

Surveillance footage shows Belgal in his car near a fire hydrant as two plainclothes ICE agents approach with guns drawn. One of them starts knocking on his window as he walks away. A second video shows the shooting, off camera, and officers swarming the area as stunned residents try to run away with their hands raised.

The young boy was traumatized by the experience, his mother told authorities.

Asked if he thought the agents broke the law, Mamdani said ICE was “looking at the law as a suggestion.”

“There’s a reason the NYPD wouldn’t shoot at a moving vehicle,” the mayor said.

Also on Sunday, Secretary Mullin doubled down on calling Belgal a “dangerous” career criminal with a lengthy criminal record who eluded ICE last month.

“When we approached his vehicle, we were giving him legal orders. We approached him like any other undercover agency, whether local, state, federal or county, that has undercover agents. We had our badges out,” Mullin said on CBS’s Face the Nation. Belgal, he added, “decided to accelerate and hit another vehicle with his five-year-old child in it, then attempted to accelerate toward other police officers.”

DHS officials said Belgal “weaponized” his vehicle, echoing similar and often disputed claims in previous ICE shootings — including the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good, 37, in Minneapolis. In Good’s case, DHS officials said she used her vehicle as a weapon, a claim directly contradicted by video evidence.

When host Margaret Brennan asked Mullin if he would release the agents’ body camera footage, he responded that DHS would “release all the information” after an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI.

Belgal had been arrested twice in the past three years for theft and drug sales and was on supervised release after being accused of selling fentanyl, heroin and cocaine to an undercover narcotics detective last year, according to court documents.

DHS said Belgal is an associate of the Trinitarios street gang who may have “direct or indirect knowledge” of the shooting of a federal Customs and Border Protection agent at Fort Washington Park in Manhattan last year.

In his Sunday interview, Mamdani said ICE asked the New York Police Department to take Belgal into custody after rushing him to Allen Presbyterian Hospital in New York.

“When they said they wanted us to arrest Mr. Belgal, I asked, ‘Under what warrant?’ We don’t have a warrant for (him) in New York. And when I asked that question, (Mullin) started using the same language that he used in the press conference, language that we know they used to describe so many people across this country,” Mamdani said on MS Now.

“They continue to use the language (that their detainees are) the worst of the worst, and when you look at who has detained ICE, over 70 percent of them have no criminal record,” he said.