New York ICE Shooting Illustrates Deliberate Policy of Harm and Medical Neglect

President Donald Trump’s ICE terror campaign against US cities reached a new height October 8 with the dangerous shooting of an unarmed Dominican man, with his 5-year-old child in the car, in a densely populated Manhattan neighborhood.

The incident adds to a growing scandal over inhumane ICE treatment of victims they harm. ICE agents have repeatedly interfered with or denied medical care for the victims they shoot. Patients have also been pulled out of hospitals prematurely against medical advice and without authorization of their doctors and other medical professionals.

California last year enacted a law that prohibits medical facilities from permitting federal agents without a valid search warrant or court order into private areas, including places where patients receive treatment or discuss health matters, the Los Angeles Times noted. The Minnesota Nurses Association is also pressing for public policies to bar ICE agents from being in rooms when patients are receiving care, and other community and patient protections.

Other states should follow and more is still needed. ICE must be held accountable, by law, for denying immediate medical care to anyone they harm, and it must be barred from removing them from any medical facility without specific medical consent and written authorization. National legislation would be best, but with a lawless administration in Washington, states should enact strict legislation to protect all patients as well as public safety.

Oscar Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck, apparently with an assault-style rifle, as seven rounds were blasted into his vehicle. ICE initially claimed they’d transported him to the hospital, a claim subsequently disproven by video. New York police officers, not ICE, transported Belgal to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. There, nurses provided “dignified care,” said their union, the New York State Nurses Association, despite an ICE presence in the hospital that “has an intimidating and harmful effect on all patients. ICE has no place on our streets or in our hospitals.”

After several hours, ICE agents pulled Belgal out of the hospital taking him to a Brooklyn jail, with a bullet still in his body, according to his lawyers. They said he was in pain, afraid for himself and deeply concerned for his unhurt but terrified 5-year-old son. There was no report that any medical staff had explicitly authorized or cleared him for such quick discharge against all medical ethics. He spent the night in a cell, not in a hospital bed despite still having a bullet in his body, an attorney said.

More than 24 hours later, Belgal was “still in pain,” Paige Austin of the nonprofit Make the Road New York, told a federal judge. “Although [Mr. Belgal] was initially hospitalized, it appears that ICE moved quickly to transfer him out of the hospital to an unknown location—raising grave concerns for his health and well-being,” his legal staff said in a court filing.

“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters. “ICE undermines public safety. This is an agency that should be abolished.” He later added, “Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.”

It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people — not targeting the “worst of the worst” they claimed, but anyone they racially profile as an enemy. Then they force the pain and physical harm they’ve caused on people against professional medical judgement. It’s what fascism looks like. As National Nurses United (NNU) repeated in August after one of its members, a Maine RN was kidnaped by ICE, “Since ICE began kidnapping Black and brown people and terrorizing our communities,” NNU has called it out as “an illegitimate, violent, paramilitary organization that must be promptly abolished.”

Belgal is far from the only person to whom ICE has shown disregard for their safety or health after being shot or otherwise harmed.

In September, a Venezuelan delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was shot by ICE agents in Austin, TX after an unmarked SUV—one that never activated its lights or siren—rammed his car as he said he was trying to pull over. After fleeing on foot, the agents shot him in the back.

He was taken to a hospital in San Antonio with a bullet in his back for four hours, apparently just given morphine, his attorney said, before being whisked away again by ICE and moved to a detention center in South Texas. At the facility, she said, “He was cold, asked for water (and) said he was in great pain, but he spent hours (there) even before he got an ibuprofen.” The bullet, that was close to his spine, remained lodged in his back for two weeks, before it was finally surgically removed after partial paralysis had set in. When he appeared in court, he was in a wheelchair.

“Democratic leaders and immigrant advocates have questioned whether Garcés Pérez received proper medical treatment and whether he was taken into custody before he could fully heal,” the Texas Tribune reported. Brian Elmore, a Global Emergency Medical fellow doctor, told The Tribune, “In somebody that isn’t detained, these patients would have close follow-up with their trauma surgery team and be discharged with pain medication. The problem with these patients is that they are often discharged in conditions where they receive inappropriate or absent medical care.”

Lack of proper medical care has been demonstrated throughout the ICE campaign. It was evident in the callous behavior of ICE agents who impeded medical personnel from seeking to reach Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in the moments after their fatal shootings by agents.

It was demonstrated in Los Angeles in 2025 during ICE presences in hospitals. In October 2025, journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias, who had been tracking ICE actions and posting them on TikTok, was wounded by an agent and taken to a downtown hospital, California Hospital Medical Center. ICE agents remained in his hospital room for nearly a week, a presence intimidating to nurses and patients, said Anne Caputo-Pearl, RN, a labor and delivery nurse and chief nurse representative for the California Nurses Association (CNA). He too was denied adequate medical treatment, including pain medication and physical therapy, while subsequently still in an ICE detention facility, said the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Three months earlier, ICE agents stayed around the clock in the hospital room of a Salvadoran detainee Milagro Solis-Portillo who had a medical emergency while being arrested. CNA President Sandy Reding, RN, who joined protesters at Glendale Memorial Hospital, said nurses and patients were frightened to see masked immigration agents in the hospital’s lobby. “Hospitals used to be a sanctuary place, and now they’re not,” she said. “And it seems like ICE has just been running rampant.”

Solis-Portillo said she was repeatedly pressured by ICE to say she was well enough to leave, and was barred from speaking to family and attorneys until she complied. They ultimately transferred her to another hospital against her doctor’s orders and without explanation, her attorney said. Her case “violates established ethical and patient care standards not only for this individual, but also for the public health and safety,” CNA said.

It has long been obvious that ICE and other paramilitary federal’s cruel behavior is intentional. It is evident in the streets, where on behalf of the Trump administration federal agents have shot at some two dozen people, killing six of them. Not only has a single agent not been federally charged, but as Jonathan Blitzer writes in The New Yorker, the federal response is always to blame the victim.

Further the administration has arrested and prosecuted hundreds of protesters; in many cases where judges have dropped charges or juries acquitted them. One major case, known as the Minnesota 15, goes to trial October 20. They are being charged not with impeding ICE, but conspiracy to impede ICE in Minnesota, notes defendant Cal Robinet.

A policy of harm, disregard, and cruelty is abundantly apparent in 239 ICE concentration camp detention centers where the death toll has reached 59 during Trump’s second term due to deliberate substandard conditions, inadequate nutrition, and medical neglect. ICE has even stopped listing where detainees are being held in its online database to hide them from family members and legal counsel.

Stephen Miller, the architect of the campaign, put it bluntly after Renee Good was murdered while administration officials branded her a domestic terrorist. “To all ICE officers: You have immunity to perform your duties and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties,” he declared.

The history of fascist dictatorships is littered with sobering examples of what happens when there are not barriers against government medical abuses, either by law, or by the opposition of the medical establishment and its practitioners.

For the medical community, if actions are taken by ICE against their medical recommendation, doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians need to speak up in real time to advocate for their patients. Hospital administrators should support them, and say this patient was taken away against medical advice. They will have public support, and laws should be enacted to protect them against retaliation.

As the Trump administration continues to use its paramilitary forces and other federal police as an instrument to target communities of color and threaten violent repression on everyone who dissents, these policies will continue to escalate without more broad, forceful responses and protest.