It’s been more than a week since Oscar Belgal was shot in the neck by an ICE agent in the Manhattan and Bronx adjacent–neighborhood of Marble Hill, and the details of what happened to the 28-year-old Dominican man — whose five-year-old son was in the backseat of his car when the agents opened fire — continue to filter out. So far, immigrant advocates still haven’t heard anything that justifies the shooting.

“Regardless of what led them to this individual, there is a proper process to ascertain an individual,” explained Murad Awawdeh, the president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, in an interview. “They could have gotten a judicial warrant. They didn’t. They could have sent him a notice to come in for a check-in. They didn’t. They could have done several different things instead of opening fire on Oscar and his five-year-old when schools were being let out in the Bronx.”

In a petition Belgal’s attorneys filed on Wednesday seeking his release from federal custody, they said that Belgal had picked up his son from school that afternoon and had stopped at a nearby McDonald’s before arriving home. Belgal went back outside to move his car from where it was parked near a fire hydrant when, he says, an armed, masked man suddenly approached his driver’s side window.

“The men did not identify themselves, show any documents or otherwise communicate with Oscar in any substantive way. Instead, without identifying himself, the first man struck and shattered Oscar’s window and began firing a pistol into Oscar’s car while his son cowered in the back seat,” the court........

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