Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin spent Friday defending an ICE officer who fired seven rounds into a car with a 5-year-old in the back seat on a crowded Upper Manhattan street, and nothing he said squared that shooting with his own department’s written rule against firing at drivers.
- Oscar Belgal, 28, a Dominican national, was shot below his left ear at about 4 p.m. Thursday in Marble Hill. He survived. His son, 5, was in the back seat and was not hurt.
- Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch says Belgal was pulling into a parking space when a plainclothes federal officer walked up with his gun drawn. Belgal pulled forward, and at least one officer fired seven times.
- DHS says Belgal ignored orders, accelerated into two ICE vehicles, and that the officers feared for their lives and did not know the boy was there.
- ICE took Belgal out of the hospital Thursday evening. On Friday a federal judge barred his deportation.
- Five people were arrested at protests Thursday night. Another was called for Friday evening in Lower Manhattan.
Most coverage has staged this as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s word against Mullin’s. That framing lets DHS off easy. The department wrote a rule for exactly this situation, issued a directive on vehicle stops in late September, and by Mullin’s own account holds body-camera video of the whole encounter. Friday’s news conference held the officer to none of the three. We think New York should.
What DHS Told Reporters
Marcos Charles, a senior ICE official, said officers “used their vehicles to block Belgal,” who then “weaponized his vehicle” and “smashed it into ICE vehicles.” The officers fired, he said, “believing that their life and the life of their partners and the general public were in danger.”
Mullin went further. He called Belgal “a thug. The absolute worst of the worst,” and said it was shameful to have a mayor who puts criminals above law-abiding citizens.
Then he turned to the boy.
“We weren’t aware the child was in the car. I can tell you that, but you know who was? Oscar. Oscar knew he had a child in his car.”
Markwayne Mullin, Homeland Security Secretary, Oct. 9, 2026
That is the department’s position, delivered on camera by its secretary. The officer who fired did not know who was in the car, so the man he shot answers for who was in it.
What the NYPD Says It Saw
Tisch’s version starts earlier, and calmer. A man is parking. A plainclothes officer approaches with a gun already out, a second officer out of uniform behind him. The car moves forward. Then seven shots.
Her account does not mention rammed ICE vehicles. It does not rule them out, either. A police security camera caught part of what happened before the gunfire but not the shooting itself.
The NYPD released its officers’ body-camera footage Friday morning. It shows police arriving after the shots, Belgal sitting on the ground, and a man in a reflective vest standing near him holding a long gun.
“There Was No Question Who Was Approaching”
Mullin insisted the officers identified themselves. “There was no question who was approaching the vehicle,” he said.
Mamdani says the officers who surrounded the car wore construction vests and masks. Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said the agents “disguise themselves as construction workers.” The NYPD video puts a man in a reflective vest, carrying a rifle, at the scene.
Take the mayor’s description and sit in the driver’s seat. Two men with no uniforms, faces covered, one gun out, coming at your car with your son buckled in behind you. “No question who was approaching” is a claim about what Belgal knew in those seconds. Only DHS can test it, because only DHS has the footage.
The Rule DHS Wrote for This Exact Moment
DHS Policy Statement 044-05, revised in February 2023 and still in force, is blunt: “DHS LEOs are prohibited from discharging firearms at the operator of a moving vehicle, vessel, aircraft, or other conveyance unless the use of deadly force against the operator is justified under the standards articulated elsewhere in this policy.”
The exception is real. Officers may use deadly force against an imminent threat of death or serious injury.
The same section also tells them to weigh “the hazards that may be posed to law enforcement and innocent bystanders by an out-of-control conveyance” before they shoot. Shoot the driver of a moving car and the car becomes that out-of-control conveyance, with a 5-year-old riding in it, on a block Mamdani said was “crowded with families and children” because school had just let out.
Mullin offers the officers’ ignorance of the boy as a defense. We read the policy the other way. Not knowing who is in the car is precisely the risk that sentence exists to prevent.
The September Directive Nobody Mentioned
In late September, ICE ordered its officers to stop high-speed chases and to make vehicle stops only if they have completed specific training. The agency had reason to: its officers have fired during more than a dozen vehicle stops since last year, killing at least four people.
Charles described Thursday’s arrest as exactly that kind of stop. Officers boxed Belgal in with their vehicles.
DHS has not said whether the officer who fired had completed the training its own directive requires. That is a yes-or-no question, and the department has the answer.
“Weaponized” Has a Track Record
“Weaponized his vehicle” is a phrase DHS has used before. In July it said Lorenzo Salgado Araujo turned his work van on officers in Houston, and three passengers in that van told a different story: nobody stood in front of it, and it was rolling at about 5 mph.
In Minneapolis, video contradicted the first ICE and DHS accounts of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Mullin had called Pretti “a deranged individual” on Fox News, then told senators at his confirmation hearing in March that he “spoke too quickly without the facts.”
On Friday, with no federal footage released, he was calling Belgal the worst of the worst.
Belgal’s record is real. He was arrested on a robbery charge in 2023, pleaded guilty to grand larceny and got probation, and faces a drug-sale charge that has not been resolved. ICE says he has alleged ties to the Trinitarios gang and slipped an earlier attempt to detain him in September.
None of it tells you whether an officer was in danger when he pulled the trigger. That is the only question the use-of-force policy asks.
Where Belgal Is Now
ICE moved Belgal from the hospital Thursday evening, and DHS said Friday he was being held outside New York, without saying where.
Mamdani says he spent two hours on the phone with President Donald Trump and Mullin trying to get Belgal released, and failed. Gov. Kathy Hochul says she delivered a similar message to both men.
Mullin’s version is that Trump offered to “release him to New York’s Finest” if the NYPD wanted to “take the charges and pursue the charges.” In other words, the city could have him back if it agreed to prosecute him.
His lawyers went to federal court instead. U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken ordered that Belgal “shall not be removed from the United States absent further order of this Court,” and barred moving him outside the districts covering New York City, Long Island, parts of the Hudson Valley and New Jersey. A hearing on his petition was set for Friday afternoon.
Release the Footage
Mullin confirmed that the officers wore body cameras and that the cameras were on. He did not commit to releasing what they recorded.
That should end the argument over whom to believe. The NYPD put its video out within a day. DHS holds the only recording of the seconds that matter, from the first officer reaching the car to the seventh round, and it is asking the country’s largest city to accept a description instead.
A secretary who has already admitted to speaking “too quickly without the facts” does not get that deference from us. If the car was a weapon, the video will show it. Release it, say whether the officer was cleared for vehicle stops under ICE’s own September order, and let an independent review, not a news conference, decide whether seven shots into a car with a child inside met the standard DHS wrote for itself.