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New York ICE Shooting Illustrates Deliberate Policy of Harm and Medical Neglect

12 0
12.10.2026

President Donald Trump’s ICE terror campaign against US cities reached a new height October 8 with the dangerous shooting of an unarmed Dominican man, with his 5-year-old child in the car, in a densely populated Manhattan neighborhood.

The incident adds to a growing scandal over inhumane ICE treatment of victims they harm. ICE agents have repeatedly interfered with or denied medical care for the victims they shoot. Patients have also been pulled out of hospitals prematurely against medical advice and without authorization of their doctors and other medical professionals.

California last year enacted a law that prohibits medical facilities from permitting federal agents without a valid search warrant or court order into private areas, including places where patients receive treatment or discuss health matters, the Los Angeles Times noted. The Minnesota Nurses Association is also pressing for public policies to bar ICE agents from being in rooms when patients are receiving care, and other community and patient protections.

Other states should follow and more is still needed. ICE must be held accountable, by law, for denying immediate medical care to anyone they harm, and it must be barred from removing them from any medical facility without specific medical consent and written authorization. National legislation would be best, but with a lawless administration in Washington, states should enact strict legislation to protect all patients as well as public safety.

Oscar Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck, apparently with an assault-style rifle, as seven rounds were blasted into his vehicle. ICE initially claimed they’d transported him to the hospital, a claim subsequently disproven by video. New York police officers, not ICE, transported Belgal to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. There, nurses provided “dignified care,” said their union, the New York State Nurses Association, despite an ICE presence in the hospital that “has an intimidating and harmful effect on all patients. ICE has no place on our streets or in our hospitals.”

After several hours, ICE agents pulled Belgal out of the hospital taking him to a Brooklyn jail, with a bullet still in his body, according to his lawyers. They said he was in pain, afraid for himself and deeply concerned for his unhurt but terrified 5-year-old son. There was no report that any medical staff had explicitly authorized or cleared him for such quick discharge against all medical ethics. He spent the night in a cell, not in a hospital bed despite still having a bullet in his body, an attorney said.

More than 24 hours later, Belgal was “still in pain,” Paige Austin of the nonprofit Make the Road New York, told a federal judge. “Although [Mr. Belgal] was initially hospitalized, it appears that ICE moved quickly to transfer him out of the hospital to an unknown location—raising grave concerns for his health and well-being,” his legal staff said in a court filing.

“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters. “ICE undermines public safety. This is an agency that should be abolished.” He later added, “Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.”

It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people — not targeting the “worst of the worst” they claimed, but anyone they racially profile as an enemy. Then they force the pain and physical harm they’ve caused on people against professional medical judgement. It’s what fascism looks like. As National Nurses United (NNU) repeated in August after one of its members, a Maine RN was kidnaped by ICE, “Since ICE began kidnapping Black and brown people and terrorizing our communities,” NNU has called it out as “an illegitimate, violent, paramilitary organization that must be promptly abolished.”

Belgal is far from the only person to whom ICE has shown disregard for their safety or health after being shot or otherwise harmed.

In September, a Venezuelan delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was shot by ICE agents in Austin, TX after an unmarked SUV—one that never activated its lights or siren—rammed his car as he said he was trying to pull over. After fleeing on foot, the agents shot him in the back.

He was taken to a hospital in San Antonio with a bullet in his back for four hours, apparently just given morphine, his attorney said, before being whisked away again by ICE and moved to a detention center in South Texas. At the facility, she said, “He was cold, asked for water (and) said he was in great pain, but he spent hours (there) even before he got an ibuprofen.” The bullet, that was close to his spine, remained lodged in his back for two weeks, before it was finally surgically removed after partial paralysis had set in. When he appeared in court, he was in a wheelchair.

“Democratic leaders and immigrant advocates have questioned whether Garcés Pérez received proper medical treatment and whether he........

© Common Dreams