NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and Mayor Zohran Mamdani attend an unveiling ceremony for a new 9/11 Memorial Wall on Sept. 9, 2026, in New York City.
Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The October 8
shooting of Oscar Belgal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of his 5-year-old son in Manhattan forced into the open a question that had been on many New Yorkers’ minds: What would the New York Police Department do when ICE broke the “rule of law” in the city, and how would Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the person who has the power to hire and fire the NYPD commissioner, respond?
Shortly after the shooting, Mamdani addressed the incident with an appropriate amount of outrage,
declaring
ICE “rotten to its core,” and calling for the department to be abolished. His frustration was visible, but he was much less expressive when it came to his appraisal of the city’s response to the situation. He had nothing substantive to discuss with respect to his police department’s involvement, despite NYPD officers arriving on the scene only to find unidentified ICE agents holding guns, wearing plain clothes and disguises and
masks
, in apparent violation of federal laws
requiring
identification. (A recently passed New York state law prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks and other face coverings was
temporarily blocked
by a judge.) NYPD officers applied first aid and transported Belgal to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen hospital.
According to many
eyewitness accounts
and widely circulated
video
, members of the NYPD appeared to assist ICE agents by forcefully helping with crowd control — at one point, an NYPD officer shoved congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani
personally stumped
for, to the ground. Later, NYPD
cleared a path
for federal agents to whisk Belgal away from the hospital to a federal detention facility downtown.
ICE Shooting in NYC Inflames Mamdani’s Policing Problem
After the shoo
… [more]
