The Bullet They Left in His Neck

An agency shot a 28-year-old father in front of his five-year-old son. A week later, the bullet is still in his neck, and no one in charge of him will say whether he will ever get surgery.

"Oscar Bengal should have NEVER been in the streets of New York, but it's thanks to the Biden Administration and sanctuary politicians that ICE was forced to conduct a targeted operation to remove this criminal illegal alien from their community."

— Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, in a statement to amNewYork (surname spelled as issued)

On the afternoon of October 8, Oscar Belgal, 28, a Dominican immigrant who came to the United States in 2022, had just picked up his five-year-old son from school. In Marble Hill, the part of the island that is Manhattan by postal code and the Bronx by map, he was pulling away from a parking spot near a fire hydrant on West 225th Street when, in the words of his lawyers' filing, "an anonymous, masked man stormed Oscar's driverside window with his firearm drawn, followed closely behind by several other masked men also wielding firearms."

They did not identify themselves, show a warrant, or, per the 58-page habeas petition filed by the Legal Aid Society, "communicate with Oscar in any substantive way." One of them smashed the driver's side window and opened fire. At least seven rounds went into the car. One took Belgal in the neck. His son was in the back seat.

A nearby resident, Iris Rosa, told The Intercept that a man in a high-visibility vest, posing as a construction worker, peeled it off in the aftermath. ICE, the outlet noted, "routinely pose[s] as construction workers" to stake out targets. Belgal climbed out of his car seeking medical help. The agents pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him while he bled, fading in and out of consciousness.

The government's version of the afternoon is tidier. In a statement issued the day of the shooting, a DHS spokesperson described "a targeted enforcement operation" in which "an ICE officer discharged his weapon and the criminal illegal alien was injured." Marcos Charles, the head of ICE's enforcement and removal operations, said Belgal "refused orders to exit his vehicle," then "accelerated and smashed into two government vehicles" as officers tried to block the car. DHS said its agents fired because they believed their lives were in danger.

Belgal's lawyers say the sequence runs the other way. NYPD security camera footage, released a week later, shows a man in a sweatshirt and red hat bashing the window with his gun barrel, then firing. The Associated Press, which reviewed the video, said it "doesn't conclusively resolve the dispute." That is generous language for footage in which the first violence on camera is federal, and the car does not move until after being hit.

DHS has also supplied that it tried to arrest Belgal in the Bronx on September 18, that he has ties to the Trinitarios gang, and that his 2025 grand larceny conviction (under appeal) disqualifies him from the streets. The lawyers deny the gang claims, note that ICE has presented no evidence for them, and point out that the Notice to Appear, the document that formally charges a person with being removable, was not created until October 9, the day after the shooting. On October 8 there was no warrant.

Translation: every frame the government has released puts federal violence first, and the details it has withheld are the ones that would make the shooting look like what it looks like on camera.

At NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, doctors stopped the bleeding and said removing the bullet would require surgery. Come back the week of October 12, they told him. Instead, he woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed, and only then did the men in civilian clothes say they were ICE.

He was moved to New Jersey and then, on October 9, to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, "notorious for medical neglect" and the same jail holding former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Belgal sits in a segregated unit under 24-hour lockdown, with no access to his family. The bullet is still in his neck. His face is numb on the left side. His left ear, in his words, hears the world "as if it were far off in the distance." For his pain, he has been given ibuprofen.

On Sunday, his lawyers said he had not eaten a meal since being detained, with access only to water from a bathroom sink. The Bureau of Prisons responded with boilerplate so durable it could survive any injury: it "does not deny any inmate necessary medical treatment or basic necessities."

The part of the story no official statement ever mentioned is the back seat. Belgal's son, five, watched his father get shot. The boy began screaming that his father had been killed. He did not speak for several days. He has nightmares every night. His father, in a segregated cell with a bullet in his neck, "replays the traumatic events of Oct. 8 over and over in his memory, with his son's hysterical cries ringing endlessly in his head."

That is the work the word "targeted" is doing in "targeted enforcement operation": a verb in disguise. A 28-year-old father identified, tracked, and shot on the very last afternoon of school, so the deportation machine could stay on schedule.

In the federal custody business, the standard treatment for a bullet in the neck is a pill, a cell, and a waiting list.

The rest of New York reacted the way New York reacts. Thousands took to the streets the day after the shooting, and rallies have continued into this week, demanding an end to ICE's presence in the city, an end to its use of parking lots, and the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Activists at a protest the night of the shooting reported seeing NYPD "helping the ICE vehicles whisk away our neighbors and come in and out of the hospital."

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said "agents surrounded him and a 5-year-old child in his car before firing multiple rounds." Rep. Adriano Espaillat tried to visit Belgal in the hospital and was turned away at the door by ICE agents. The state nurses' union said its members were "appalled" that "ICE officers fired multiple shots at an unarmed man with a five-year-old child."

The one official with authority has said the least. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did not defend the agents' aim or the hospital's delay. He defended the driver. He said the officers did not know a child was in the car, and he blamed Belgal for putting his son's life in danger. The secretary of homeland security, justifying the shooting of a man in front of his son, focused on the man.

The courts, at least, are moving. On Friday, October 9, a federal judge issued a temporary order blocking Belgal's deportation. On Wednesday, Judge Hector Gonzalez of the Eastern District of New York, a Biden appointee, ordered the government to show cause by 10 a.m. Monday why Belgal should not be released, or to consent to release "without prejudice." He also barred deportation or transfer out of New York's two federal districts while the case is pending.

The filing's details read like a catalog of everything wrong. The custody determination form in Belgal's removal case was signed by a DHS agent identified in videos of the shooting itself. The shooting is under investigation by Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI, the agency that shot him and the agency that reports to the secretary who blamed the victim.

And Belgal is not a glitch in the machine. He is the machine, running as advertised. By The New York Times' count, at least 25 people have been shot at by federal immigration agents since the start of the Trump administration. In July, after two fatal shootings and a botched arrest in Las Vegas, ICE mandated a new dress code for field operations. The dress code, it turns out, is optional. The men in Marble Hill were wearing sweatshirts, a red hat, and a high-visibility vest.

So where does it stand on Monday? The deadline to explain why a shot man with a bullet in his neck should stay in a cell is 10 a.m., and the answer, if history is any guide, will be a sentence, not a surgery.

The bullet an ICE agent put in Oscar Belgal's neck is, in the most literal sense, still inside him. So is the case. One of them a surgeon can reach. The other is in the hands of a federal government that has spent a week demonstrating it would rather wait. The question was never whether the shooting was justified. The question is what an agency learns about itself when it can leave a bullet in a man's neck, a father in a cell, and a son in nightmares, and call the whole thing a targeted operation.