After ICE Shooting, Progressives Want New York’s Police Commissioner to Step Down

Por Sophie Hurwitz — Mother Jones Magazine

The ICE shooting of a 28-year-old in the Bronx Thursday has provoked an uproar among New Yorkers, who rushed to the streets in protest the night of the shooting, clashing with the New York Police Department. At least five protesters were arrested. And though members of the NYPD were not involved in the shooting, they were involved in arresting protesters and, some witnesses say, protecting ICE vehicles—despite a New York State law that prohibits local police departments from collaborating with the federal agency, as well as local “sanctuary city” laws.

Allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani are now calling on his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, to step down if ICE does not leave New York City.

Oscar Belgal, the man who was shot in his car while his five-year-old child sat in the backseat, is being hold in the MDC Brooklyn federal detention facility. He was shot at least seven times, according to police. Some ICE agents at the scene were dressed as construction workers; at least one carried a long gun. Belgal, according to his lawyers, was transported first to a local hospital, then to ICE custody in New Jersey and then to the federal prison in New York City in the hours following his shooting. He still has a bullet lodged in his body, one of his attorneys told a federal judge during a hearing Friday.

Though Mayor Zohran Mamdani called for the abolition of ICE shortly after the shooting, his New York Police Department seemed to coordinate with ICE agents, clearing the way for ICE vehicles to pass through a crowd of protesters at a hospital near the scene that evening.

“We cannot call ourselves a sanctuary city when the NYPD clears the path for ICE but goes after protesters like we saw last night,” Devashish Basnet of the New York Civil Liberties Union said at a rally Friday. “Our city can’t claim to stand up for us against the Trump regime when our police commissioner carries water for Homeland Security and smears the name of Oscar Belgal, like she did last night.”

That police commissioner, third-generation billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch, is a holdover from Eric Adams’ mayoral administration who has pushed to expand surveillance infrastructure in New York City. At a press conference Thursday, she highlighted Belgal’s two prior arrests.

Democratic Socialist allies of Mamdani called for Tisch to stop New York police officers from working with ICE either formally or informally—or, failing that, to step down in the aftermath of the shooting. The New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which propelled Mamdani to his upset victory ten months ago, released a statement Friday saying that “ICE is a terrorist agency that must be expelled from New York City and abolished.”

“Jessica Tisch must get ICE out of New York and end NYPD complicity with these terrorists,” the group wrote. “If the commissioner can’t put a stop to these injustices, she must be fired.”

Congressional candidate Darializa Chevalier of the Bronx, who can be seen on video being shoved to the ground by NYPD officers at a protest the night of the shooting, also called for the police commissioner’s resignation on Friday morning, as did State Assemblymember Claire Valdez.

“The NYPD spent more time protecting a militia that just shot someone than protecting New Yorkers,” Chevalier wrote on social media. “Last night, the NYPD and Commissioner Tisch violated the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary city policies and fueled the Trump Administration’s attempt to demonize our communities.”

Mamdani reportedly spent hours on the phone with President Donald Trump Friday attempting to negotiate Belgal’s release, but was unsuccessful.

Federal immigration officials, meanwhile, are defending the shooting—and arguing, as they often have in ICE shooting cases, that Belgal was only shot at because he “weaponized his vehicle.”

Marcos Charles, a top ICE official, said in a statement that Belgal “weaponized his vehicle and proceeded to accelerate toward other officers.” In the statement, Charles says that ICE agents transported Belgal to the hospital; NYPD body camera footage shows that police, not ICE agents, did so.

Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of Homeland Security, asserted that it was not ICE agents who put Belgal’s five-year-old son in danger by shooting into the car, but Belgal who put him in danger by putting him in the car in the first place.

“We weren’t aware the child was in the car,” Mullin said Friday, according to NBC News. “I can tell you that, but you know who was? Oscar.”

Fonte: Mother Jones Magazine