Darializa Avila Chevalier was at a community meeting in Harlem on Thursday afternoon when her phone began blowing up with news that plainclothes federal immigration officers had just shot a man in his car in Marble Hill, the northernmost Manhattan neighborhood. Avila Chevalier, the likely next congresswoman for the district, rushed to the scene on West 225th Street and began asking the NYPD about which federal agency had shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in the neck as a 5-year-old was in the back seat. “We were told a number of agencies, but the only ones that I was able to see any kind of identification for was HSI,” she says, referring to Homeland Security Investigations. “There were a number of plainclothes agents, who we believe were ICE agents, walking around.”

Minutes after the shooting, protesters rushed in to demand that federal officers — including an agent in a construction vest with a long gun — leave the scene and the city. Avila Chevalier went with demonstrators across the Spuyten Duyvil Creek into Inwood, where Belgal had been taken to Allen Hospital. On the protest line, she says, “police just began escalating. It was truly just chaos.” The congressional candidate says she was trying to get between protesters and the police when an........

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