NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — ICE operations have been taking place quietly in the New York City area for months now, there just hasn’t been a high-profile incident that has happened until Thursday’s shooting, according to immigration experts that spoke with 7 On Your Side Investigates.
On Thursday afternoon, an ICE agent shot Oscar Belgal in Manhattan, with his 5-year-old son in the backseat of his car.
The Department of Homeland Security said Belgal has a criminal history, rammed two vehicles and previously evaded agents.
While it’s the first high-profile incident in New York City, it’s a familiar headline in other parts of the country.
There’s Renee Good’s shooting death while behind the wheel in Minneapolis in January. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot to death during a traffic stop in Houston in July. In September, an ICE agent shot and seriously wounded a man during another traffic stop in Austin.
Immigration attorneys say they’re noticing a trend.
“They’re conducting so many traffic stops like this,” said Veronica Cardenas, a former ICE prosecutor turned immigration attorney.
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Cardenas said she has had hundreds of local immigrants reach out to her this year, arrested in a similar way.
“The majority of my clients, they’re driving when they’re getting stopped,” Cardenas said. “They’re driving to work, they’re driving coming out of getting coffee and going to their cars so this manner of stops has now been the norm.”
There has been an increasing number of cases reported alleging federal agents were dressed as construction or utility workers while conducting operations from California to Minnesota to New York City. One was captured on an NYPD bodycam during Thursday’s shooting, wearing a yellow and orange construction vest.
“So, ICE has the authority to lie to people essentially, and they’re trying to cover up who they are,” Cardenas said.
Also seen on bodycam, another federal agent, kneeling next to Belgal, wearing a hoody and tending to the man’s gunshot wound.
“It becomes harder for a person to obey commands from a law enforcement officer when they’re not even disclosing who they are,” Cardenas said.
Cardenas believes ICE enforcement has picked up in the Tri-State since this summer, and not just during traffic stops.
“I had somebody picked up in Newark in December going down to Disneyworld with his family,” said immigration attorney Michael DiRaimondo. He added, “He didn’t get on the plane… picked him up before getting on the plane.”
DiRaimondo says that was a first.
“Yeah, that’s never happened before,” he said.
A New York City audit shows a 71% increase in local ICE arrests during the first 15 months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.
This, as reports that ICE has increased an arrest quota nationwide from 2,000 to 3,000 immigrants a day, according to sources that spoke with ABC News. It’s something the administration denies.
Homeland Security pushed back on the press’ reporting of ICE’s tactics in New York City for not reporting on previous offenses by other undocumented residents.
“But yet there’s a lot of attention on this thug with an extensive criminal history, that we were serving a lawful warrant on, that had already evaded us before,” said Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin.
Secretary Mullin claimed that as a result, people only hear about apprehensions when they result in gunfire, which is not the norm.
“We arrest thousands, thousands every day. The worst of the worst. I say every day, every week,” correcting himself. “The worst of the worst. You guys don’t cover all those.”
New Jersey and New York rank third and fourtyh in the country for total number of ICE arrests. Nationwide, 40% of those arrested had no criminal history.
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