Lawyers for a Dominican illegal immigrant shot by ICE say a bullet remains in his neck and he has not eaten, even as a judge blocks his deportation and his violent record draws fresh scrutiny.
Oscar Belgal, 28, is being held in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn after plainclothes ICE agents wounded him in the neck during a New York arrest attempt last week, according to a joint statement from his attorneys at the Legal Aid Society and Make the Road New York.
The New York Post reported that lawyers describe a man who still carries a bullet in his neck, feels numbness on the left side of his face, and can barely hear out of his left ear. They say doctors told him he urgently needs surgery, yet the procedure was judged too dangerous on Thursday evening without a specialized surgeon on hand.
Belgal, authorities said, entered the United States illegally in 2022. He has a 2023 armed robbery conviction and a 2025 bust for allegedly selling fentanyl, cocaine, and heroin. He is also described as a reputed member of the Trinitarios street gang.
Those details matter when his lawyers frame the case as pure cruelty. Federal officers were trying to take a convicted armed robber with alleged drug-dealing and gang ties off the street. Belgal had his young son with him when the encounter turned dangerous.
The shooting unfolded in the Marble Hill neighborhood shortly after 4 p.m. Thursday. Belgal had just picked up his son. Plainclothes ICE agents moved on his SUV. When he tried to pull away, agents fired into the vehicle and wounded him in the neck.
Marcos Charles, head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, said Belgal “accelerated” at the agents, “smashing” into two of them. The Post noted that allegation was not captured on at least part of the CCTV footage it obtained. A five-year-old inside the vehicle was unharmed.
Fox News reported Charles’s fuller defense of the shooting: officers, using their training and believing their lives, their partners’ lives, and the public were in danger, fired their weapons. NYPD later released bodycam video of the aftermath and surveillance video of moments before and after the gunfire.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has backed the agents. The Washington Examiner reported that Mullin told reporters at a Friday DHS press conference Belgal had an extensive criminal history and had a five-year-old in the vehicle when he tried to escape the arrest.
Mullin went further in remarks carried by Breitbart, putting the blame for endangering the child squarely on Belgal.
"Oscar knew he had a child in the car. Oscar chose to accelerate at a high rate of speed and ram two different vehicles as he appeared to be going towards officers. And so, the public outcry should also be towards this criminal, this thug, this gangbanger, this possible murderer. That outrage should be with him for endangering the five-year-old."
That is the sequence advocates prefer to skip: a convicted robber with alleged narcotics and gang ties, a child in the back seat, and an alleged ramming run at federal officers before any shot was fired.
Belgal’s lawyers paint a grim picture of what followed. They say he remains in solitary at the Brooklyn federal lockup, the same facility that has held high-profile inmates including alleged healthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione and deposed Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
"Mr. Belgal is living through an unimaginable nightmare."
In their joint statement, the attorneys added that while he sits in solitary, “a bullet remains lodged in his neck, the left side of his face is numb, and he can barely hear out of his left ear.” They also cite a shoulder wound from shattered glass.
"Doctors have told him he urgently needs surgery, but that the procedure was too dangerous to perform Thursday evening without a specialized surgeon present."
They claim he was instructed to return to the hospital this week but has been left unsure whether the surgery will happen. They further claim he “has not eaten a single meal since Thursday” and “has been told that the only water available to him comes from a bathroom sink.” During time alone in the cell, they say, he has been “forced to relive the terrifying moments of being shot.”
The lawyers accuse ICE of “deliberate indifference” and say the shooting and detention “are further examples of the cruelty and disregard for basic human dignity that have long defined this agency.” They vow to fight for his “immediate release from detention” and for medical care, due process, and dignity “to which he is entitled under the law.”
Former neighbors offered a different memory of Belgal. They told the Post he used to terrorize them with a machete, a detail that sits awkwardly beside courtroom language about dignity and nightmares.
A federal judge has now stepped in on Belgal’s side of the custody fight. U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken barred the Department of Homeland Security from deporting him while his detention challenge is pending and blocked any transfer outside New York or New Jersey, Breitbart reported.
Immigration attorney Harold Solis struck a familiar note after the shooting, arguing that a criminal history does not make it “lawful” or “OK to shoot a father in an afternoon with his son in the back seat.” Local officials and advocates criticized the operation as protests followed.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called for ICE to be abolished. That demand fits a broader pattern in which city leaders treat federal immigration enforcement as the scandal and the illegal immigrant with the rap sheet as the injured party, a dynamic also visible when Bronx neighbors rejected the mayor’s claim that the shooting suspect counts as a New Yorker.
Secretary Mullin has pushed back on that rhetoric. In related coverage of the same Bronx operation, DHS chief Mullin said Mamdani’s words fuel hostility toward officers who already face resistance on the street.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the pile-on from another angle, demanding a probe of the Bronx ICE shooting and faulting a retailer for assisting agents, another signal that some Democrats treat cooperation with immigration law as the offense.
Strip away the medical drama and the core facts remain straightforward. Belgal is not a random delivery driver swept up by mistake. Authorities tie him to illegal entry in 2022, a 2023 armed robbery conviction, and a 2025 case alleging sales of fentanyl, cocaine, and heroin. Reputed Trinitarios membership adds another layer for any officer deciding whether a sudden vehicle movement is flight or an attack.
That profile matches a wider New York problem: illegal immigrants with long rap sheets cycling through violent cases while activists demand lighter custody and slower removal. Similar patterns appear in other city crime stories, including wanted suspects in an off-duty NYPD detective stabbing who were illegal immigrants with extensive records.
Federal agents already operate under political crosswinds in New York. Courts have even had to police local attempts to hobble them, including a case in which a federal judge struck down New York’s mask ban on ICE agents on constitutional grounds. Against that backdrop, a ramming allegation and a child in the car are not minor footnotes. They are the reason officers say they fired.
None of this resolves every open question. Absolute calendar dates for the Thursday shooting are not pinned down in the initial reporting. Full medical confirmation of the lodged bullet, food status, and surgery timeline has come through lawyers rather than hospital or Bureau of Prisons statements. And the precise CCTV picture of contact with the two agents remains contested in the public accounts.
What is not in dispute is the choice advocates keep making. They elevate Belgal’s jail complaints and slow his removal while soft-pedaling the armed robbery, the alleged dope sales, the gang reputation, the machete stories from neighbors, and the decision to punch the gas with a five-year-old inside the vehicle.
ICE’s job is to arrest removable criminal aliens. When a target accelerates at agents, officers get one chance to stop the threat. Lawyers can call the aftermath a nightmare. Taxpayers can notice who created it.
