ICE Shooting in NYC Inflames Mamdani’s Policing Problem
The Intercept · L · trust 59/100
After ICE shot a young father in Manhattan, New Yorkers asked the mayor to protect them from his police department and federal agents alike.
Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp Mayor Zohran Mamdani looks on as Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch speaks to the press after an ICE agent shot a man in New York City on Oct. 8, 2026. Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing a firestorm over how his administration handles policing and responds to federal immigration raids after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot 28-year-old father Oscar Belgal in front of his 5-year-old child in Manhattan on Thursday.
Outraged New Yorkers poured into the streets Thursday night and soon clashed with the New York City Police Department, inflaming a perennial point of tension for the city’s socialist mayor. Mamdani has faced criticism from his left for neglecting to pursue aggressive reforms of the NYPD and distrust from his right for having vowed to rein in the department. Now, as residents recover from the latest in a string of violent episodes in President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, Mamdani is tasked with shielding his city from ICE and controlling his local police.
“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mamdani said Thursday night, standing side-by-side with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration known for pushing to expand the department’s sweeping surveillance apparatus . While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his detractors argue the mayor must do more than deliver harsh words.
Mamdani’s rhetoric marks “a great first step,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “But what is the city going to do other than deliver that? What are the actionable ideas that they’re planning? That’s the piece that we need to be pushing more on hearing about, because we’re gonna keep being in the same situation.”
Legally, there isn’t much Mamdani can do to keep federal immigration agents out of the city. Despite the steps he’s taken to curtail their access to city property or stop the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers’ private data, Trump and the federal agencies sending ICE to New York are the only ones who could actually stop them from coming.
But Mamdani’s administration could make it harder for ICE to operate in New York by exerting more control over the NYPD, immigration advocates argue. The department later showed up at the protests on Thursday night, and rapid response activists at the scene alleged its officers were speaking with agents from Homeland Security Investigations, which they viewed as evidence of coordination.
Pete Gizas, director of the White House National Security Council and Homeland Security Investigations New York Acting Special Agent in Charge, was at the scene liaising directly with NYPD personnel, according to two rapid responders who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from law enforcement agencies.
One rapid responder said Gizas was there for hours, “speaking directly to both NYPD and federal personnel. He had HSI officers in his immediate area going door to door, getting into apartment buildings.” Another witness confirmed that they’d seen Gizas interacting with the police.
“Why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?”
“If NYPD is in fact an agency that is controlled by the mayor of New York and by the people of New York, then why is a crime scene, a shooting scene, being presided over by Homeland Security Investigations?” said the first rapid responder, who added that they’d seen members of the ICE investigative unit going in and out of the local NYPD precinct.
The NYPD doesn’t have an official partnership with ICE, which would be prohibited by sanctuary city laws and a state law passed in August. But the department has been notified of ICE activity in the city and shares information like fingerprints with federal agencies, which in turn shares that information with ICE.
Awawdeh said even if the police aren’t helping ICE detain people, they’re still helping them move freely around the city and carry out their operations.
“They’ll not cooperate or work with ICE on immigration enforcement, but then when they do crowd control, it does end up becoming collusion because then you’re still helping them do the thing you’re not supposed to be doing,” he said.
ICE directed questions about Gizas being at the scene to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson said, “The NYPD does not conduct civil immigration enforcement.”
Mamdani has already faced a barrage of criticism for his abandonment of several police reform promises he made on the campaign trail. Advocates want him to get rid of Tisch, who is widely associated with the “tough-on-crime” tenure of former Mayor Eric Adams , and disband a controversial unit often deployed to protests known as the Strategic Response Group. (Mamdani has said he still wants to disband the unit but has not provided a plan or a timeline to do so. His office and an NYPD spokesperson told The Intercept that the unit was not deployed on Thursday.)
According to eyewitness accounts and footage of the protests shared on social media, NYPD officers pushed demonstrators, including knocking down Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier. But there don’t appear to have been mass arrests. In a statement to The Intercept, an NYPD spokesperson said the agency arrested five people at the protests and issued them tickets to appear at the precinct.
“We’re seeing both the shock of ICE’s violence, but we’re also seeing this aggressive treatment of the protesters and of the response to people who are speaking out,” said Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the…
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