On the afternoon of Thursday, October 8, as families in the Marble Hill neighborhood were picking their children up from school, ICE officers stopped Oscar Belgal and fired multiple rounds into his car, hitting him in the neck. Belgal’s five-year-old witnessed everything from the back seat.
This horrific shooting is the inevitable consequence of the Trump regime’s unhinged and lawless campaign to terrorize, dehumanize, and deport our immigrant neighbors and rip apart our communities.
We need a Congress that will abolish ICE. But that doesn’t mean New York can’t act – we demand New York officials act now to bring justice for Oscar Belgal and to protect our communities:
• Conduct an investigation into the shooting of Oscar Belgal and whether Federal Agents violated state laws. Agents allegedly wore plainclothes, fired automatic weapons into a car carrying a child, and took Mr. Belgal from the hospital precipitously leaving his lawyers unable to find him.
• The New York City Department of Investigation must conduct an investigation into the NYPD’s role with ICE and publish its findings. If it does not independently initiate one immediately, the Mayor or the New York City Council must direct DOI to do so. In the wake of the shooting that evening, we saw the NYPD clear the way for ICE but go after protestors.
• The New York City Council must pass:
1) The Communities United to Reject Brutality (CURB) Act (Intro. 796), which would protect demonstrators like those who came out to protest ICE in the hours following the shooting, end the NYPD’s violent Strategic Response Group (SRG) from responding to protests, and prohibit the most aggressive tactics used by the SRG from being used against protestors.
2) The NYC Trust Act (Intro. 209), which would bolster city sanctuary policies by creating a path for people who have been wronged by violations of our sanctuary laws to have their day in court and hold the city accountable.
3) Intros 1077 & 1078, which would prevent collusion between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials. These measures seek to close loopholes in our city’s sanctuary laws by further limiting communication between the Department of Correction and federal immigration authorities and prohibiting police from holding someone longer than usual without a judicial warrant for ICE.
• The state must pass legislation that broadly prohibits state and local law enforcement from colluding with ICE. That includes barring the sharing of sensitive information with federal immigration agents, using local resources to enforce federal immigration laws, and funneling people into ICE custody.
I’m counting on you to do whatever it takes to make sure ICE doesn’t open fire on any more New York families.
