Photo: David Dee Delgado/Reuters

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 officer threw her to the ground. “My arm and my lower back hurt for most of the evening,” she says. “Thankfully, I’m okay today, but it was a pretty aggressive push.” Four protesters were arrested.

Darializa Avila Chevalier is on the front lines and got knocked down as NYPD and protestors shoved and fought over police barricades pic.twitter.com/cBXMKuV89e

— Timmy Facciola (@TimmyFacciola_) October 9, 2026

Months after President Donald Trump’s deportation czar, Tom Homan, promised to flood the city with ICE agents, New York is now facing its biggest immigration test yet in the second Trump administration. On Thursday night, Mayor Zohran Mamdani described the shooting as an “outrage” and repeated his call to abolish ICE. The next morning, he spent two hours on the phone with President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin; he urged them to release Belgal, a Dominican national who had previously been arrested for grand larceny. But the call didn’t have the desired result. Before Belgal’s hearing on Friday afternoon, even his lawyers said they did not know where he was within ICE’s deportation machine. At a press conference, Mullin criticized Mamdani, claiming his calls to abolish ICE “incite hostility.” He also came to the defense of federal agents, saying they didn’t know a child was in the car when they put seven bullets in it.

Mamdani, once again, is being squeezed between critics on the right and his base of support on the left. In a statement on Friday, Avila Chevalier called for the resignation of NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch. “The NYPD spent more time protecting a militia that just shot someone than protecting New Yorkers,” the candidate wrote. She was also concerned that the commissioner, in a press conference on Thursday night, had referred to Bengal’s grand-larceny guilty plea in 2023. “What was incredibly appalling to me was that after all of this had transpired, the police commissioner, instead of condemning ICE’s actions, began vilifying the victim of its violence,” says Avila Chevalier. “To me, that was just so obscene and unacceptable. It was truly enraging, and it goes against the spirit, if not the letter, of our sanctuary policies that she is supposed to be upholding.

As for Mullin, Avila Chevalier — who will be one of the most left-leaning representatives in Congress next year — said his comments, including the claim that officers did not know a child was in the car, had the “stupidest line of logic.”

“If this was a targeted arrest, then they would have known who they were arresting,” she says. “They would have known that he was a father; they would have known where he was going and who might be with him. They would have known that, at the time he was driving there, it would be a very public space. It would have been a time of people passing by who are coming from home and school. It just shows that these people are not only cruel, they’re also idiots. They’re idiots who do not care what the impact is on our community.”

On Friday, a federal judge in Manhattan instituted an order for immigration officials not to deport Belgal as his attorneys file an emergency habeas corpus petition so he can remain in the country. As of Friday evening, he is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, reportedly with a bullet still in his body. The 5-year-old is physically unharmed and in the care of family.

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