Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in New York City on Thursday, remains in federal custody as his attorneys say he is "living through an unimaginable nightmare." In a statement on Sunday, The Legal Aid Society and Make the Road New York (MRNY), who are acting as counsel for Belgal, described their client’s condition while in detention. Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck on Thursday while in the car with his 5-year-old child. ICE official Marcos Charles told reporters on Friday that Belgal had "refused lawful orders to exit his vehicle…then accelerated his vehicle, smashing into two of our government ICE vehicles, and then weaponized his vehicle and proceeded to accelerate going toward other officers." Belgal's attorneys dispute this characterization.
The incident prompted a swift divide between Democratic lawmakers and the GOP. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that he wanted ICE officers out of the city. He added: "We know that ICE is rotten to its core.
Today's shooting is only further devastating confirmation of what we have long known." New York State Senator Julia Salazar, meanwhile, said that she was "horrified" to hear about the shooting. "A U.S. federal agency that shoots and even murders people on the street should not exist," she wrote on X. But GOP Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told press on Friday: "We’re not putting a pause on enforcement.
In fact, I'm not sorry." Newsweek reached out to the DHS and Bureau of Prisons via email for comment and is awaiting responses. Attorneys for Belgal shared in a statement on Saturday that he had been held in "deplorable" conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn. The attorneys said that their client had a lack of access to food and inadequate medical care in the aftermath of the shooting.
"While he is currently in solitary confinement, 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," the statement said. "Doctors have told him he urgently needs surgery, but that the procedure was too dangerous to perform Thursday evening without a specialized surgeon present. "Although he was instructed to return to the hospital this week, he has been left in the dark about whether that surgery will even happen.
He is also suffering from a shoulder wound caused by shattered glass during the incident," the attorneys added. The shooting of Belgal is the latest in a series of high-profile shooting incidents involving ICE. Officers have injured at least 10 noncitizens in shootings since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
