The president of the New York County Lawyers Association (NYCLA) condemned the Trump administration for encouraging dangerous and potentially unconstitutional immigration enforcement after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot a man in an enclave of Manhattan last week.
NYCLA President Ronald C. Minkoff’s message pushed the federal immigration enforcement agency to adopt basic police safety procedures and raised the incident as a possible constitutional violation.
“In order to prevent immigration agents from posing an undue danger to bystanders, the targets, and the agents, I call for the Administration to immediately adopt policies to ensure that all immigration detentions be conducted by uniformed agents in conformity with our Constitution and consensus policing protocols, as well as limiting the unholstering of firearms by agents, and using body cameras, so as to hold agents fully accountable for their actions if needed,” Minkoff wrote in a statement.
ICE agents shot and wounded Oscar Belgal in his car, which also contained a five-year-old child in the back seat in Marble Hill, a neighborhood of Manhattan just across the Spuyten Duyvil adjacent to the Bronx, on the afternoon of Oct. 8.
According to video footage captured after the shooting, the incident appeared to occur as Belgal attempted to drive away from two armed plainclothes ICE agents after they approached him.
The statement is not the first time that NYCLA leadership weighed in on the Administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement procedures. NYCLA’s Rule of Law Task Force denounced the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti as a result of misconduct in a statement on Jan. 26.
In July, Minkoff condemned ICE’s conduct after agents shot and killed both the 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, ME, in the course of vehicular stops within the space of six days.
The statement cited the text of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which does not allow the use of lethal force “unless it is necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
The statement also pointed out that what happened in Marble Hill on Oct. 8 seemed to contradict DHS protocols on the use of force, which explicitly references the U.S. Supreme Court’s Garner decision. That ruling found that law enforcement officers cannot use deadly force to stop an unarmed, non-dangerous suspect fleeing the scene of a crime unless the officer has probable cause that the person poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security cited Bengal’s history of arrests for drug dealing and robbery in response to the statement.
“Make no mistake: ICE is not going anywhere, and we will continue to target the worst of the worst in sanctuary cities who refuse to jail criminal illegal aliens,” the unnamed spokesperson wrote.
NYCLA President Ronald MinkoffPhoto by Isabella Gallo