The shooting took four seconds, maybe less. A plainclothes federal agent rushed a silver sedan on a Bronx street with his gun drawn, punched through the driver’s window, and fired as the car pulled away. By Friday, hundreds of New Yorkers were in the streets of Manhattan, and the city’s mayor was in an open fight with the Trump administration.
The man shot was Oscar Bergal, 28, a Dominican immigrant, wounded in the neck during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation on Marble Hill Avenue in the Bronx on Thursday afternoon. The Department of Homeland Security described it as a “targeted enforcement operation” against what it called a criminal illegal alien. A five-year-old child was sitting in the car at the time. The child was physically unharmed.
Bergal is expected to survive.
What happened next turned a street encounter into a political crisis. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a Democrat who has clashed with the White House before — responded to the shooting with a two-word post on X: “Abolish ICE.” The phrase is a rallying cry on the American left, but coming from the sitting mayor of the country’s largest city, in the hours after a federal agent shot a civilian, it detonated.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin fired back within hours, telling reporters that Mamdani’s words were “dangerous and incite hostility.” His question was blunt: “Mayor, if you abolish ICE, who’s going to take criminals off the streets of your own town? Who’s going to take the murderers and the thieves and the gangbangers?” DHS has said Bergal had an extensive criminal history.
By Friday, the street answered back. Hundreds of protesters stretched for several blocks through Manhattan, chanting “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here” and “No ICE,” according to an AFP journalist on the scene. Outside the hospital where Bergal was being treated, a separate confrontation flared: protesters grabbed at police barricades and pushed back, officers moved in, and the NYPD said at least five people were taken into custody. A Democratic congressional nominee was shoved to the ground in the scrum, according to footage circulating on social media.
Video of the shooting itself, shared by US media on Friday, has added fuel. It shows what appears to be a plainclothes agent rushing toward the silver car with a gun drawn. The vehicle briefly reverses as the agent punches the driver-side window; a second plainclothes officer draws a gun and points it at the driver as the car pulls away, appearing to clip a passing vehicle.
Behind the scenes, the mayor was on the phone. Mamdani said Thursday he wanted to speak with President Trump and would demand that immigration agents be withdrawn from the city. By one account, he spent two hours on the phone with Trump and Mullin trying to negotiate Bergal’s release from federal custody. The negotiations, Mamdani confirmed, were unsuccessful. Late Thursday night, ICE moved Bergal out of the hospital in an SUV with blacked-out windows as protesters threw bottles at the vehicle.
Why this matters: New York is one of several Democratic-run cities that bar their police forces from helping federal immigration enforcement — the so-called sanctuary city policy the administration has been trying to break for years. This shooting hands both sides exactly what they have been looking for. The mayor gets a vivid, violent image of federal power operating beyond local control, in his city, with a child in the back seat. The administration gets a wounded suspect with what it calls an extensive criminal record, and a mayor on record saying abolish the agency doing the arrests. Nobody is persuading anybody. The test now is practical: whether federal agents stay in the streets of New York, and whether the fragile, warmer-than-expected relationship between Mamdani and Trump survives the first real confrontation of the immigration crackdown. Both sides have now escalated on camera. Backing down is the one option neither side seems to be considering.
Featured image: Anti-ICE protesters marching in New York in an earlier rally. (Photo: SWinxy, CC BY, via Wikimedia Commons)
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