ICE Fired Seven Rounds at Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill

An ICE officer fired seven rounds at Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill on October 8, hitting him in the neck with a 5-year-old in the car.

Belgal, 28, a Dominican national named Oscar Bergal in court papers, survived. City cameras show a parking space and a gun already drawn. Federal officials describe a ramming. That gap opened eight days after ICE issued tighter rules for vehicle stops.

A Parking Space, a Drawn Gun and Seven Rounds

Marble Hill is a Manhattan neighborhood that sits on the Bronx mainland, along West 225th Street and Marble Hill Avenue, beside a 1-train stop. School had just let out, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said, and the street was crowded with families.

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, briefing beside the scene that night, said federal agents were running a targeted operation to take a man into immigration custody. He was in a gray Honda CR-V with a 5-year-old boy the department believed to be his son. City police were not part of the operation and were not on the block when the shots were fired.

THE HOUR AT 2 MARBLE HILL AVENUE

1. 4:04 p.m., October 8, 2026: The NYPD takes two 911 calls of a person shot near 2 Marble Hill Avenue, while a federal agent calls 911 for the Fire Department and then for police.
2. Seconds earlier on Argus cameras: Belgal backs the Honda into a parking spot in front of a fire hydrant. A plainclothes federal officer walks to the driver’s window with his gun drawn. A second plainclothes officer moves in at the driver’s-side headlight.
3. The Honda rolls forward: The SUV leaves the camera frame. The Argus system does not record the gunfire.
4. On the pavement: Officers from the 50th Precinct Conditions Team, already nearby on another job, find several men in mixed clothes, some in construction-style vests and face masks, at least one with a long gun, and Belgal handcuffed on the ground.
5. At the hospital: Those city officers put him in an NYPD vehicle, give aid, and take him to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where he arrives in stable condition with a wound below the left ear.

Investigators recovered at least seven shell casings. The Honda had ballistic damage to the front windshield and a shattered back window, and it sat perpendicular to the road. An ICE gray four-door sedan had a damaged left front panel, with the lower panel fully disconnected. The child was found safe with a family member after a wellness check.

Pedro Almaraz, who works at a nearby restaurant, said he heard several shots and saw a man on the ground ringed by officers in face masks and vests with Department of Homeland Security branding. Witnesses, he said, were screaming.

ICE Says Belgal Drove at Officers

DHS spent the night of October 8 saying only that an ICE officer had discharged a weapon during a targeted arrest of a “criminal illegal alien.” The fuller federal story came on October 9 in Washington, from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Marcos Charles, ICE’s executive associate director for Enforcement and Removal Operations.

Charles said officers tried to box Belgal in, gave orders to get out, and met a refusal. Then, in his words, Belgal “accelerated his vehicle, smashing into two of our government ICE vehicles, and then weaponized his vehicle and proceeded to accelerate going toward other officers.” Charles said the officers fired because they believed their lives, their partners’ lives, and the public were in danger.

We weren’t aware the child was in the car. But do you know who was aware? Oscar. Oscar knew he had a child in his car.

Markwayne Mullin, Homeland Security Secretary, Washington news conference, October 9, 2026

Mullin called Belgal a “thug” and “the absolute worst of the worst,” said he was in the country without authorization, and tied him to the Trinitarios gang, a claim ICE has not backed with public charging papers. Charles said agents had tried and failed to detain him in September. Mullin said any agent who fired was placed on administrative leave, the usual step after a shooting, and that ICE body cameras were on. Those files were not released with the city’s footage.

Tisch’s public file on Belgal is narrower than Mullin’s. She listed two New York City arrests: a 2023 robbery case that ended in a guilty plea to fourth-degree grand larceny and five years of probation, and a 2025 drug-sale case that is still open. Electronic court records show a not-guilty plea in the drug case. Charles also described the neck wound as superficial.

WHERE THE ACCOUNTS DIVERGE

• The approach: City cameras show a parking job and a gun already out; ICE describes a boxed-in arrest and lawful orders to exit.
• The movement: Tisch has the Honda pulling forward and leaving the frame; Charles has it striking two ICE cars and driving at officers.
• The child: Mullin said officers did not know a child was inside; Mamdani’s complaint is that they fired seven times into a car that had one.
• The sedan: The ICE car’s torn left front panel is real either way, and it is the piece of metal both stories have to explain.

A nearby shop’s street video never became the public record. The NYPD released body-camera video of the aftermath, including officers carrying Belgal into a police SUV, not of the shots. The live fight on the shooting is not really about Belgal’s probation file. It is about those few seconds after the Honda left the hydrant space, when an officer already standing at the headlight had to decide what the car was doing.

On October 8, at approximately 4:00 PM ET, ICE officers were conducting a targeted enforcement operation in the Bronx, New York, to arrest a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with a prior criminal conviction for grand larceny, and multiple prior arrests for…

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 8, 2026

Eight Days After the Chase Ban

On September 30, ICE sent new vehicle-stop guidance to Enforcement and Removal Operations, the division Charles leads. The memo landed after a string of vehicle encounters in which ICE officers opened fire. Across all immigration shootings, not only car stops, federal officers had shot at least 21 people and killed 7 since January 2025. In vehicle stops alone, officers had fired in more than a dozen encounters since last year and killed at least four people.

The September 30 memo did not ban car stops. It said only officers who had finished one of six agency courses could run traditional stops or high-risk “call-back” stops, and that untrained officers could ride only in support. Vehicles used for stops were to carry lights and sirens. Every officer on scene “must have an agency-issued and activated body worn camera.” Officers were not authorized “under any circumstances” to chase a car that failed to pull over; they were told to take the plate and investigate later. Pinning a car with another vehicle, to trap it, stayed allowed.

An ICE spokesperson, asked about the memo in early October, said it was a reminder and “makes no changes to how ICE conducts vehicle stops.”

WHAT THE MEMO ASKED AND WHAT MARBLE HILL LOOKED LIKE

Pinning is the honest overlap. If Charles’s box-in happened as he described it, the memo allowed that tactic. What the memo tried to change was the look and the chase: marked warning, trained hands, cameras on, no high-speed pursuit. Construction vests and a gun already drawn at a parking space are the opposite costume. Eight days is a short interval for a safety reminder to fail in public on both dress and fire.

The Mask Ban New York Could Not Keep

Mamdani’s anger sat on that costume. He said the agents who surrounded the Honda wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces, with “no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents,” and that at least one carried a long gun.

Residents have no idea if these are law enforcement agents or if they are simply attacking someone on the street.

Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York City, Marble Hill, October 8, 2026

Alfred Silva, 38, a Marble Hill resident, made the same point without the politics. Anyone on the street can put on a vest and pull a gun and claim to be ICE, he said, and people should be able to tell who they are dealing with.

New York had already tried to write that rule into state law. In May 2026 the legislature passed the MELT Act, which prohibits masking by ICE agents in most public work and tells officers to show agency names and badges. Senator Patricia Fahy and Assemblymember Tony Simone sponsored it as part of the state budget. The May package also moved to keep local police out of civil immigration work and to keep ICE out of jails, schools, hospitals and churches without a judge’s warrant.

WHAT THE BLOCKED RULES REQUIRED

• Open faces: No mask or covering that hides identity during public civil enforcement, with narrow safety exceptions.
• Visible ID: Agency name and a personal name or number on the uniform.
• Local lane: No 287(g)-style deals that turn city or state officers into immigration agents.
• Sensitive places: No ICE searches of homes, hospitals, churches or schools without a judicial warrant, under the May package.

On August 3, U.S. District Judge Mae D’Agostino issued a preliminary injunction against the mask ban and the ID mandate. She wrote that New York may be right that masked, unmarked federal officers create danger, and still held that the state cannot set uniform rules for federal agents under the Supremacy Clause. DHS had already said it would not follow the ban. So the identification problem Mamdani named on October 8 was not a surprise. It was the legal status quo the city and state had lost in August.

How Belgal Left Allen Hospital in an Unmarked Van

Mamdani said he spent two hours on the phone with President Donald Trump and Mullin on the night of the shooting, asking them to release the wounded man and to pull ICE operations out of the city. “Those negotiations were unsuccessful,” he said. “Just moments ago, ICE put the man in an unmarked vehicle and whisked him away.”

This afternoon in Marble Hill, a New Yorker was shot by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood. Early reports indicate agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds. We believe the child was physically unharmed.

This is an…

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) October 8, 2026

Tisch had already told the room that federal agents had taken over the investigation. City officers had been the ones who drove Belgal to Allen Hospital. Family members were not allowed to see him there, his lawyers later told a judge. ICE then moved him, first out of Manhattan, with a stop in New Jersey, and then to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. For hours, counsel said, they could not find him.

Paige Austin, an attorney with Make the Road New York, told the court on October 9 that she reached him briefly by phone. He was in pain, she said, and a bullet was still in his body more than a day after the shooting. Court papers also say he has a 1-year-old child in addition to the boy who was in the Honda.

His lawyers argue the arrest lacked a valid warrant and that no notice to appear in immigration court had been issued, and they asked for his release. Mullin’s answer to the mayor was that New York’s limits on local cooperation force ICE into street arrests in “unpredictable and dangerous environments,” and that sanctuary rules put the public at risk. Mamdani’s answer was that ICE makes the city less safe, that the agency should be abolished, and that there is “no explanation for federal officers firing this many rounds into a car that has a 5-year-old in the car.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, also on the phone with Trump and Mullin that night, asked for a halt to ICE operations in New York and for the federal body-camera files. “New Yorkers deserve to know exactly what happened and why,” she said. City Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic and whose district includes Marble Hill, said she was heartbroken and enraged. Demonstrators chanted “ICE off our streets now,” marched to the hospital, and shoved at barricades. Police made five arrests that night near West 120th Street and Broadway. A larger march moved through Manhattan on October 9.

A Federal Judge Stops the Next Transfer

Lawyers got a habeas petition filed the day of the shooting in the Southern District of New York, under the caption Bergal v. Genalo, No. 26-CV-8928, naming Kenneth Genalo and other federal officials as respondents. On October 9, U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken, sitting as the Part I duty judge, issued a two-page order to keep the court from losing the body.

The order says the petitioner shall not be removed from the United States without a further court order. It also bars transfers except to a facility in the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of New York, or the District of New Jersey. Oetken wrote that the freeze was needed to preserve jurisdiction and to let Belgal take part in the case. It remains in force until the assigned judge vacates or changes it. The docket later lists Judge John Peter Cronan.

The order does not free him, does not rule on the shooting, and does not decide whether ICE had the power to arrest him. It stops the next long hop. MDC Brooklyn sits inside that map, which is why the freeze can hold him in the city without opening the door.

The Bronx DA Opens an Investigation of the Agents

Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said on October 9 that her office is investigating the shooting and “working to establish facts and determine the appropriate course of action.” Attorney General Letitia James said she has “full faith” in Clark to do that work “without fear or favor.” The FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit are also on the file, while ICE has kept the immigration case.

That split is the operational leftover of a street arrest in a city that will not hold people for civil immigration requests. NYPD cameras, shell casings, and the hospital run are in city hands. The only cameras that could have been pointed at the Honda when it left the Argus frame belong to ICE. Mullin said those cameras were running. Charles, whose division received the September 30 stop memo, is the same official who told reporters the Honda had been turned into a weapon.

Belgal remains in federal custody under Oetken’s freeze, with a bullet his lawyer says is still in his neck, while a five-year-old who was in that car is with family. The ICE video is the next fact that would settle whether a parking space became a ramming, or whether armed men in contractor vests created the flight they then answered with seven rounds.