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public safety
New York ICE Shooting Illustrates Deliberate Policy of Harm and Medical Neglect
It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people.
Oct 12, 2026
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.
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Man in Darth Vader Costume Praises Flock Cameras at City Council Meeting: ‘The Emperor Is a Fan’
"We must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium."
Aug 20, 2026
Residents of San Diego are up in arms about Flock cameras. But for those seeking to keep tabs on "rebel scum," the omnipotent surveillance technology has its uses.
That's according to one Darth Vader, who took the podium during the public comment period at a Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee Meeting in the California city on Wednesday night to sing, or more accurately, bellow his praises for the company, whose automatic license-plate reading (ALPR) cameras are fast being installed around the nation.
"The emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," the person dressed as the infamous Star Wars villain said.
"Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license [plates]; they are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this," the sith lord continued. "I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend."
There are more than 550 Flock cameras installed across the city of San Diego, according to a public database by the activist group DeFlock.
And while the person who embodied the dark lord has not yet been identified, the satirical performance gave voice to some of the well-documented ways that the technology has been used to create a nationwide panopticon that enables widespread warrantless spying.
One database published earlier this month by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian nonprofit law firm, found over 100 documented cases of police using the technology for “romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct.”
Vader was also not exaggerating about the use of Flock cameras to spy on children. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an internet-focused civil liberties group, found, some school districts have enlisted cops to track families in order to root out "residency fraud" and prove that they live in the district.
"A search of ALPR data will show a lot more than whether a family lives within the right zone," wrote Dave Maass, EFF’s director of investigations, and Rindala Alajaji, a legislative activist with the group. "Every time a plate is searched, it can reveal personal information about a family: when they go to the doctor, when they go to worship, when they go out at night, and where they travel on vacation. None of that is the school district's business, and these searches are a huge invasion of privacy."
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How the Left Can Flip Crime From a Political Liability to a Political Advantage
Democrats can go on offense by defining what it actually means to be serious about safety: not by stoking fear, but by advancing a clear, consistent, solutions-driven agenda that both prevents crime and breaks its cycle.
May 17, 2026
As the economy falters, prices surge, and yet another Middle East conflict grinds on with no clear endgame, Donald Trump’s presidency appears to be slipping into free fall. His support has eroded among the very voters who once powered his return to office, and Americans are losing confidence in the issues that once defined his appeal—especially the economy and immigration. With the midterms looming, Republicans are flailing.
But Trump and the Republicans always have a tried-and-true political playbook: fearmongering about crime. And unless Democrats go on the offensive, it just may work.
Trump has already signaled that crime will once again be a centerpiece of the midterms. In support of that aim, he has repeatedly urged Congress to pass “a tough new crime bill,” falsely taken credit for bringing down crime rates, and exploited crime victims to cast Democrats as cold and uncaring in the face of tragedy. But crime is not the strength it once was for Trump.
Thanks to his unpopular federal troop deployments and violent mass deportation tactics, voters are losing confidence in his approach to public safety.
As ICE, the National Guard, and other federal forces expand their footprint in communities across the country, voters are getting a clearer picture of what “tough-on-crime” governance looks like in practice—and most don’t like what they see.
To be clear, Republicans still hold an overwhelming advantage on crime in public opinion. But that edge is driven less by outcomes than by emphasis: They talk about crime relentlessly—even when rates are near historic lows—amplifying and exploiting understandable fears. Democrats, by contrast, too often cede the narrative—either by pivoting to safer ground or by trying to one-up Republicans with “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that voters don’t find convincing.
Today, Democrats of all stripes are talking loudly and often about affordability—the right tactic after being perceived as out of touch in the wake of the 2024 election. But they have yet to find a unified message around public safety, leaving them vulnerable to the inevitable barrage of GOP attack ads stoking fears of crime and immigration.
My team and I have briefed dozens of candidates and elected leaders over the past several months, and the message we are so often left with is one of hesitation and uncertainty around public safety. From our work with Hill offices to mayoral candidates, the reality is that the party is not prepared to truly address crime. Unless Democrats define the issue on their own terms, they’ll once again be forced to play defense on one of the most politically potent issues in American life.
Democrats cannot afford to go silent on crime, nor can they afford the “tough-on-crime” approach that some in the party are advocating—a familiar playbook that echoes the advice many received last year on immigration enforcement. But those who followed that guidance are now finding themselves under attack for it. Votes once seen as smart politics—backing measures like the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act, resolutions praising US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, or increased funding for the Department of Homeland Security—are quickly becoming political liabilities. As ICE, the National Guard, and other federal forces expand their footprint in communities across the country, voters are getting a clearer picture of what “tough-on-crime” governance looks like in practice—and most don’t like what they see.
This moment presents an opportunity. Democrats can go on offense by defining what it actually means to be serious about safety: not by stoking fear, but by advancing a clear, consistent, solutions-driven agenda that both prevents crime and breaks its cycle. In a country where nearly half of all people have had a family member incarcerated and about 3 in 10 people say they or a member of their household have been a victim of a crime, we must chart a new path forward. Democrats don’t have to look far to see which solutions truly deliver on safety.
Democratic mayors are working to drive historic declines in crime—through sustained investments in youth programs, community violence intervention, crisis response, targeted gun enforcement, and rebuilding trust between police and the communities they serve. Leading cities of all sizes, they’ve seen firsthand how violence shatters families and makes everyday life feel unsafe. They’ve also seen the damage of blunt “law and order” approaches that destabilize neighborhoods, limit opportunity, and erode cooperation with law enforcement.
These leaders are channeling a broader political reality: Most Democratic and independent voters want leaders who are serious about safety, not a return to reflexive “tough-on-crime” politics. That means a comprehensive approach that responds swiftly to stop violence, solve crime, and prevent it in the first place. It pairs accountability with fairness—holding everyone to the same standard, including police and elected officials. And it reflects a continued belief that public safety is strengthened not just through enforcement, but by giving people a real chance to break cycles of incarceration and build stable lives. Importantly, as we head toward the midterms, polling shows that when Democrats demonstrate to voters that they are truly serious about safety, this approach consistently outperforms “tough-on-crime” rhetoric.
Notably, these local leaders come from across the Democratic spectrum. Regardless of whether they consider themselves progressives, moderates, or something in between, they share an approach that works to deliver safety and win elections. They know that safety isn’t about scoring political points; it’s about building credibility and delivering what works. It’s time Democrats learned that lesson as well.
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