ICE’s Violence Is The Greatest Threat To Public Safety

On October 8, Oscar Belgal was shot in his car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. According to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYC Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, agents surrounded the man’s car, which had a 5-year-old child in the backseat, before firing seven rounds. A photograph taken a few hours after the shooting showed the car crashed into a concrete barrier, with a bullet hole in the windshield, two holes in the rear side window, and one in the rear panel.

Belgal was reportedly struck in the neck and taken to the hospital. While the child miraculously sustained no physical injuries, as Mamdani notes, this experience will leave him “traumatized and terrified.” Mamdani further remarked, “Tonight, millions of our neighbors are wondering whether they will be safe on our streets, in our schools, at their work sites.”

Those words are far from hyperbole. Additional photos obtained The Intercept show a federal agent in a high visibility safety vest wielding an assault rifle. An eyewitness said that the man was posing as a construction worker before the incident. This would not be the first time Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents disguised themselves to surveil targets. In 2025, ICE admitted that their agents were posing as construction workers in New York as part of an ongoing operation. Earlier this year in Minneapolis, ICE agents were caught disguising themselves as utility workers using fake license plates in clear violation of state law.

The sad reality is that Trump does not need to taunt Iran into attacking American cities—ICE is already doing that.

Not only do these secret police tactics undermine public trust and accountability, they also create additional risks. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s mass immigration agenda, people have impersonated masked ICE agents to commit robberies, kidnappings, scams, sexual assaults, and to terrorize immigrant communities across the country.

All of which raises several questions: Did ICE agents properly identify themselves to Belgal? Or did he just see a construction worker with an assault rifle pointed at his car and child? Did the officers try to deescalate the situation? Or did they take advantage of the confusion their own disguises created to justify unwarranted violence?

Importantly, Wired reports that one of the ICE agents present at the scene has been identified as Brenden Cuni, an ICE supervisor who has been involved in several illegal street arrests:

Court filings accuse him of using a Taser on a handcuffed man, while activists have alleged he is one of the agents seen forcing a pregnant woman to the ground during a Minneapolis operation. In recent months, federal judges have repeatedly found arrests involving Cuni unlawful. One judge called an arrest warrant he signed ‘fraudulent,’ while another said that video evidence contradicts his sworn account of an arrest; in a third case, the government withdrew his sworn statements as inaccurate.

Given the circumstances, as well as ICE’s track record of unprovoked violence and the string of ICE impersonations, Belgal would have had every right to fear for the safety of himself and the child. While ICE blames sanctuary policies and undocumented immigrants for endangering the public, it is their fascist tactics and the incompetence of their officers that are actively making the country less safe.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately responded to this latest violent incident by blaming the victim. They claimed that federal agents were conducting “a targeted enforcement operation […] to arrest a criminal illegal alien” who had been arrested in 2023, “but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.”

Notably, their statement offers no justification whatsoever for the use of deadly force. Even if we accept DHS’ framing of Belgal as a dangerous criminal, that is not a legitimate reason for a federal agent to shoot a civilian—let alone to fire indiscriminately at a car with a child onboard. Within a rule-based democracy, prior arrests are not a license for extrajudicial violence.

This, however, is part of the problem. ICE operates as if simply being undocumented or having a criminal record nullifies any legal protections that immigrants are constitutionally afforded. In doing so, they openly violate and betray the very principles they purportedly wish to defend, while simultaneously breaking the very laws they supposedly want to uphold.

The sad reality is that Trump does not need to taunt Iran into attacking American cities—ICE is already doing that.

Importantly, this latest incident comes less than two weeks after DHS announced that ICE had “initiated a nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities.” On October 8, the same day Belgal was shot, the Trump administration reportedly launched “Operation Safe California”—a 45-day immigration enforcement surge across the state beginning in San Diego.

While the Trump administration has repeatedly targeted sanctuary cities and policies, these specific efforts are about the midterms. By targeting blue states like New York and California, Trump is hoping to sow enough fear and chaos to suppress Democrat turnout, while rallying Republicans who continue to overwhelmingly support his administration’s immigration policies. This, alongside his attempts to undermine mail-in voting and use a controversial database to check the citizenship status of voters, are part of his administration’s multipronged strategy to remain in power. As Trump himself has noted, if Republicans lose the midterms, he’ll “get impeached.” It is that fear—not public safety or concern for the American people—that is driving this latest round of ICE violence. In the end, Trump only cares about one thing: himself.

Ultimately, ICE must be abolished, but in the short term we must do everything we can to defend our communities against Trump’s armed gestapo and his attempt to steal the midterms. This includes pushing our elected officials to pass and enforce meaningful checks on ICE activities, supporting journalists and media outlets documenting ICE abuses, as well as creating community support networks to help victims of ICE’s brutality.

Yesterday it was Belgal. Three weeks ago, it was Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. Tomorrow, it could be any one of us. For everyone’s sake, we must put an end to ICE’s violence once and for all.