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 shooter killings in a scathing rebuke of the controversial federal officers he wants out of New York City.

“It feels as if you’re almost looking at a mass shooter as opposed to seeing someone who’s purportedly representing a federal agency,” Mamdani said in an interview on MS Now. “What you could see in that video and in the videos that have been released since is people, bystanders, outside, unsure as to what they were even seeing.

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

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

While video of the actual shooting has not been released, agents were in plainclothes, some disguised as construction workers, when they ran up to Belgal’s car, their weapons raised at the undocumented immigrant.

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

“I implored both of them (to look) at the footage,” Mamdani said. “You’re talking about agents who are opening fire in broad daylight. Again, we’re talking about around 4 p.m. on a Thursday. We’re talking about people carrying their shop bags, walking by a bodega, thinking they’re on their way home. Then they hear shots ring out, and they don’t even know whether this is from someone who is supposed to be a law enforcement agent or just someone who is 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 in the MDC Brooklyn federal jail, which has been used to house ICE detainees since last year.

Lawyers for Belgal said Sunday that their client is being held under “deplorable” conditions and hasn’t been given 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 have told him he urgently needs surgery, but that the procedure was too dangerous to perform Thursday evening without a specialized surgeon present,” 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 reports being confined to a solitary cell, where he is forced to relive the terrifying moments of being shot. He says he has not eaten a single meal since Thursday and has been told that the only water available to him comes from a bathroom sink.”

U.S. Judge Paul Oetken prohibited the feds from removing Belgal from the country absent a ruling from him and said he must remain in New York City or New Jersey.

Surveillance footage shows Belgal in his car by a fire hydrant while two plainclothes ICE agents approach with weapons drawn. One of them starts punching at his window as he pulls away. A second video shows the shooting, which is off camera, and agents swarming the area as stunned residents try to run away with their hands raised.

The young boy was left traumatized from the experience, his mother told officials.

When asked if he thought the agents broke the law, Mamdani said ICE “view the law as a suggestion.”

“There is a reason why the NYPD would not be shooting at a moving vehicle,” the mayor said.

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

“When we approached his vehicle, we were giving lawful commands. We had approached him just like any other undercover agency that’s out there, from local, state, federal, or county that has undercover officers. We had our badges out,” Mullin said on CBS’ Face the Nation. Belgal, he added, “decided to accelerate and- and ram into another vehicle with his five-year-old in the vehicle, and then tried to accelerate towards other police officers.”

DHS officials have said Belgal “weaponized” his vehicle, echoing similar, oft-challenged claims in past ICE shootings — including the killing of Renee Good, 37, in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. 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’d release footage from the agents’ body cameras, he said that DHS would “release all the information” after an investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI.

Belgal had been arrested twice over the last three years for robbery and selling drugs and was free on supervised release after being charged with 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 officer in Fort Washington Park in Manhattan last year.

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

“When they said they wanted us to take Mr. Belgal into custody, I asked, ‘On what warrant?’ We do not have a warrant for (him) in New York City. And when I asked that question, (Mullin) started to go into the same language that he used in the press conference, language that we know they have used to describe so many 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 ICE has detained, more than 70 percent of them do not have a criminal record,” he said.