Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of dangerous words that incite hostility after the mayor attacked ICE following a Bronx shooting.
Speaking to reporters in Washington on Friday, Mullin charged that Mamdani’s furious response to a Bronx ICE operation the day before crossed from politics into something far more reckless. The mayor had demanded that federal agents leave the city and called for the agency to be abolished after officers shot a suspected migrant gang member who, officials said, accelerated a car at them.
The clash puts a national spotlight on sanctuary-city politics, federal immigration enforcement, and a mayor who, Mullin argued, will not back the officers who protect New Yorkers every day.
Police identified the wounded man as 28-year-old Oscar Belgal. Federal officials said he was in the country illegally, wanted in connection with gang-related activity, had a detainer, and was out on probation. Belgal was shot in the neck and taken to a hospital. His 5-year-old son was in the back of the car and was not harmed.
ICE said Belgal defied orders and used the vehicle as a weapon, accelerating at federal vehicles and officers. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch confirmed that at least one ICE agent fired seven rounds. Tisch also made clear the NYPD had no involvement in the federal operation before the shooting.
Mullin told reporters he had already spent two hours on the phone with Mamdani. President Trump also spoke with the mayor and, according to Mullin, offered to release Belgal to NYPD custody. That did not cool the mayor’s rhetoric.
Late Thursday, Mamdani reacted furiously to the incident. He claimed ICE agents were endangering New Yorkers, demanded Belgal’s release, and said immigration officers should leave the city. He went further still, calling for ICE to be abolished and blasting the agency as “rotten to its core.”
Mullin rejected that framing outright and labeled the performance what he believed it was.
He said he was “speaking facts” while the mayor spoke “with a political tone,” and he called the mayor’s posture “political theater and he knows it.”
On the charge that ICE itself is the threat, Mullin did not say much.
"His words are dangerous, and incite hostility. It doesn’t help."
He pressed the point on who Belgal was and what the mayor chose to defend.
"You’re going to call that a New Yorker?! I think that’s a far cry. He said that ICE is rotten to the core. Really? When men and women at ICE each day are enforcing the laws that he refuses to enforce."
Mamdani’s public line was that federal immigration enforcement makes the city less safe. He said he had delivered that message to the president and to the public.
"We know, and I have said this directly, whether to the president or to the public, ICE undermines public safety. It makes us less safe,"
Mullin answered with the enforcement record and the local gap he said sanctuary politics create. He noted that ICE arrests thousands of criminal suspects every week, and he accused the mayor of turning a blind eye while refusing to stand up for his own police.
"We arrest thousands, weekly, that are criminals and he turns a blind eye to it and won’t even stand up for his own NYPD officers, that by the way, protect him every single day,"
The Homeland Security secretary, a former Oklahoma senator, also rejected any talk of a pause.
"No, we’re not putting a pause on enforcement. I’m sorry, we’re not. In fact, I’m not sorry. Our job is to enforce the nation’s laws and go after the worst of the worst, and our men and women do a dang good job at it every single day, and we will not stop doing our job."
Mullin’s larger argument reached past one Bronx street. He said criminal activity does not stay bottled up inside sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. It spreads.
“The criminal activity doesn’t stay in the sanctuary cities or the sanctuary states,” he said. “It bleeds over to other neighborhoods. It bleeds over to other states. It bleeds over to other areas that they don’t want this criminal activity.”
In his account, sanctuary politicians build a safe haven, then federal agents have to move in later to pull the worst offenders off the street. Belgal’s case fit the pattern Mullin described: an illegal immigrant with a gang-related want, a detainer, and probation status, still on the road with a child in the car when ICE moved to make an arrest.
Mullin said the agents did not know the five-year-old was inside the vehicle. The child was unhurt. The mayor’s response still centered on driving ICE out of New York.
Mamdani’s call to abolish the agency drew Mullin’s sharpest practical question. If City Hall gets its way, who removes the murderers, thieves, and gang members from New York streets?
“He said he wants to abolish ICE,” Mullin said. “Well, Mayor, if you abolish ICE, who’s going to take your criminals off the streets of your own town? Who’s going to take the murderers and the thieves and the gangbangers?”
That is the accountability gap at the center of the fight. Federal officers enforced national law against a man described as a criminal illegal immigrant tied to gang activity. The city’s mayor answered by attacking the agency, demanding the suspect’s release, and insisting ICE leave town. Police Commissioner Tisch’s account left little room for confusion about local involvement: the NYPD was not part of the federal operation before the shots were fired.
President Trump, a staunch defender of ICE, was already scheduled to be in New York State on Friday afternoon for a campaign stop in Syracuse on behalf of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman. Mullin’s public broadside landed in that same window, a federal department head drawing a hard line while the mayor of the nation’s largest city argued that immigration enforcement itself is the danger.
Tensions between City Hall and federal immigration authorities were already high. The Bronx shooting, the mayor’s abolish-ICE demand, and Mullin’s refusal to slow enforcement turned those tensions into an open fight over whose side local leadership is on when officers face a vehicle used as a weapon.
When a mayor shields the offender and targets the agency that made the arrest, law-and-order voters know exactly which way City Hall is leaning.
